States of the Centre

In his column in The Sunday Express, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar wrote on the anti-outsider campaign that has recently raged in Mumbai. He made some unexceptionable points — that such politics is illiberal and unconstitutional. And some political points — that some of the migration from states like Bihar to cities like Mumbai is due to the states’ backwardness which is a result of a “development deficit due to lopsided economic policies of the Centre”. But something else that the Bihar CM said merits closer attention. The Centre — that is, the Union government and prime minister — must intervene in such a fracas between states, he urged. It has the responsibility to uphold the national interest in situations where it seems endangered by competitive parochial politics. Kumar has a point, and it is not one that is either confined to or exhausted by the recent turn of events in Maharashtra.

The restructuring of Centre-state relations is a continuing and yet incomplete process. India’s federalism started as a system with distinctive centralising features — the office of governor, all-India administrative services, centralised revenues, the Centre’s emergency powers. These tendencies were encouraged by the dominance of the Congress party at the Centre and in the states. Disputes between the Centre and the states and among states themselves could be resolved within the party fora. But the situation changed once Congress dominance began faltering since the late ’60s and finally collapsed in the ’90s. Now, as new regional parties ruled the states and also demanded their share of the Centre through participation in coalition governments, there was need for new mechanisms to ensure cooperation and consultation among states and between the states and the Centre. To an extent, that need has been met by institutional design and innovation — be it the National Development Council, the Inter-State Council or the Zonal Councils established to promote balanced socio-economic development in regions. Yet, there is a way in which the Centre has not reinvented itself adequately to play its new role of a credible mediator between confident and powerful states.

In times when states have become the primary site of the political and the economic, the onus is on the Centre in at least one crucial way. It must ensure that the dialogue between the several parts that make up the whole does not flag.

Story continues below this ad

It must act as the initiator of that conversation, and its moderator.

In these decentralised times, the ‘national’ must not become a constraint on the fulfilment of regional possibilities. But equally, as Nitish Kumar suggests, the Centre must not allow the irresponsible tug-of-war between regional compulsions to undermine the very idea of coexistence in a diverse setting.