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Many years back I read a book on China by the historian W J F Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis, where he describes one of the basic tenets of Chinese civilization as “that uniformity is inherently desirable, that there should be one empire, one culture, one script, one tradition”.
My reading of Indian history has always convinced me that this is where lies a basic difference in the historical legacy of Chinese and Indian civilizations. India celebrates diversity, in spite of all the messiness that it entails. The RSS/BJP leadership is in some basic denial of this Indian legacy. ‘One nation, one everything’ is its motto. The call for ‘One nation, one election’ has only been the most recent salvo in a whole barrage of actions meant to promote a centralised nation-state based on Hindu majoritarianism.
But this is bound to raise federal tensions in a country of deep diversities and in the long run endanger national unity. As it is, as constitutional experts will testify, Indian federalism has had more ‘unitary’ or centralising features than most federal countries. Some of this goes back to the foundation of the republic (arising out of concern for the immediate anxiety about fissiparous tendencies around the Partition time). In fiscal federalism, vertical fiscal imbalance between the centre and the states has been a persistent feature. Today, while the states incur 64 per cent of total public expenditure, they collect only about 38 per cent of the revenue, and their borrowing power is subject to central approval.
In the quarter century of 1989-2014, when regional political powers and national coalition governments were prominent, this imbalance in Indian political and fiscal arrangements was partly corrected through negotiations, but these corrections were not institutionalised. Now those arrangements are largely discarded, by a ruling party that has absolute majority and firm faith in over-centralisation.
Over the last decade federalism has been battered in various ways. For example:
* The completely arbitrary and unilateral breaking down of the state of Jammu and Kashmir is something unthinkable in most federal polities of the world.
* Governors in non-BJP states regularly break procedural conventions in harassing and hindering elected State governments.
* Elected Delhi state government is openly incapacitated in its administration of services
* Much of the grant-giving authority of the erstwhile Planning Commission that used to be exercised in consultation with the states has now been unilaterally transferred to the Ministry of Finance.
* Terms of reference for the Finance Commission are changed in a centralising direction.
* Under GST, the states gave up some fiscal powers for the sake of pan-Indian economic integration but the centre has veto power in the GST Council, and often there are delays in the promised compensations to the states.
* Central bureaucrats often bypass state governments and give orders directly to district-level administrators in inflexible implementation of centrally-sponsored schemes.
* State subjects like law and order, agriculture and public health are often trespassed by unilateral central actions; there is arbitrary use of investigative agencies to hound opposition leaders; there is use of controversial laws like Unlawful Activities Prevention Act against minorities and dissenters; farm laws were rammed through Parliament without any discussion; during the pandemic use of the central Disaster Management Act did not take into account the varied stages of preparation and incidence in different states, and so on.
* Imposition of central laws in education and labour with very little consultation with the states in areas that belong to the Concurrent List.
Official business in Central executive and legislative matters is often conducted in only one of the two ‘official’ languages specified in the Constitution, spoken not even by the majority of the Indian population.
Much of this has regularly offended the sense of autonomy and dignity of regional people and created disarray and distrust in Centre-state relations. Even economic centralisation, which has the positive value of integrating markets, has some adverse political effects. For example, the central welfare schemes, openly delivered as the Prime Minister’s 'gifts' to the poor (sometimes with his photograph attached) – supplanting the earlier idea of citizens' rights (to food, housing, education, etc.) – in bypassing local political intermediaries undermines the processes of downward accountability which are essential to the health of a democracy.
Even in election-funding in the afore-mentioned quarter century there was a spurt of regional capitalists who were the main political donors for the regional political parties. Under the current regime central encouragement of corporate concentration in a small number of (often 'crony') national conglomerates, who are also the presumed main donors for the ruling national party through a murky electoral bond scheme, has weakened political competition and enabled a protected oligarchic economy.
Going back to the civilisational legacy with which we started, the RSS/BJP idea of transforming India into something like a European nation-state (some of the RSS ideologues in the past were openly in admiration of the German nation-state) is something some of the leading social thinkers of India had openly and vehemently argued against. For example, in their many essays and lectures M K Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore had repeatedly pointed out how the western idea of a nation-state based on singular ethnicity, religion or language would be utterly inappropriate and positively harmful for the diversity of India's population and against the grain of the folk-syncretic pluralistic tradition of its popular culture at the grassroots (much of it developed over centuries in the Bhakti movements rebelling against the dominant Brahminical tradition that inspires the RSS ideology). A civilisational legacy cannot be altered so peremptorily.
The author is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of California, Berkeley
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
