Opinion Old stage,new players

At one level,there is remarkable continuity in India’s federal practice: every major stage in the country’s 60 years of constitutional politics has witnessed a somewhat identical pattern. Often,the Centre aims at remaining in the driver’s seat. Only after agitations,protests and pressures from state governments does the Centre give in to the demands of the states. Thus,Jawaharlal Nehru had to set aside his scepticism about linguistic states and create language-based states. Indira Gandhi,too,had to accept the demand for a separate state of Punjab,and later on enter into an agreement with Sheikh Abdullah. Even in cases of nominating Congress chief ministers,the Central leadership would try to dictate terms as far as possible,but cave in if it realised that there was no option. Inheriting a deeply fractured and bruised nation,Rajiv Gandhi assuaged regional aspirations by making agreements left and right; but he also de-federalised the process of federalisation by designing the 73rd and 74th amendments and thereby developing an instrumentality for Central intervention bypassing the state government.

All this is perhaps only natural given the enormous powers of the Centre accruing from the constitutional arrangement. In other words,the role and powers of the states evolve more out of practice and negotiation than through principles and institutional arrangement. This simultaneously puts a premium on political mobilisation,and allows for a flexibility resulting from political contingencies. The states’ capacity to veto the Central government is neither static nor constitutional; it depends on political exigencies and compromises. Both at the level of government policy and party practices,federalisation has mainly been a result of political compulsions.

The continuity in federal practice,however,is also punctuated with the specificities of each circumstance. In the case of Nehru,the specificity was the early post-Independence nationalism,post-Partition anxieties and,of course,Nehru’s persona. Indira Gandhi,on the other hand,chose to steam-roll the state leadership of her party in most cases. This was accompanied by sub-democratic tactics and the charisma gained by the Bangladesh war. Also,both in the case of Nehru and Indira Gandhi,assertion of the Centre’s predominance was coupled with the ability to appeal to the masses beyond and bypassing the state leaders. In other words,their assertions included a construction of an all-India objective or motif — however contestable — for Central power.

In sharp contrast,the post-1989 period has witnessed the emergence of the federal issue more as a result of an inability to construct any all-India motif. This is evidenced in at least five respects. First,states emerged as the theatre of politics,thereby throwing up state-level patterns of political competition and policy concerns. Second,following from this,political leadership increasingly found it impossible to construct and appeal to a national electorate — Atal Bihari Vajpayee was perhaps the last leader to have something similar to this ability and he too had to depend on Hindutva to momentarily sustain that ability. Third,the politics of Hindutva failed to produce the all-India motif that its architects hoped for and ironically,they had to resort to a federal strategy to overcome the limitation of their strategy. Fourth,the other meta-national theme of the period,backward-caste politics,was also inherently regionally fractured — or regionally constructed. And fifth,the idea of development lost its ability to construct itself at an all-India level; instead,each state and each region within states began to imagine development from the regional-state perspective — which is,indeed,a failure of the idea of development as practised so far,but also a result of the economic policy regime that dominates this period.

Let us then go back to the two questions mentioned at the beginning. Are we headed towards a new federal era? The Lokpal fiasco and the current debate over NCTC clearly indicate that we need institutional practices that take into account the reality. This reality is marked by an inability to construct the all-India motif. In this backdrop,more formal federal processes will have to emerge for governance to be possible in the first place,and to be accommodative as well. Perhaps we do not require dogmatically federal institutions. Instead,we require practices that understand the reality that there is no Centre that can “keep the states together”. Nor do we have the leadership that can manufacture the all-India motif and sell it to the public over the heads of the states. Over and above the five factors mentioned,this is also the result of politics being run non-politically and by non-politicians. Any federal solution,without attendant politics,is bound to flop.

Politically,both the Congress and the BJP seem to have exhausted their capacity to form workable coalitions. Thus,there is an absence of a nucleus around which coalition formation can take place and,second,an absence of any particular political,ideological or programmatic position that binds the coalition. This is similar to the National Front scenario,where no single party was in a position to forge a workable coalition,but instead parties came together on a contingent basis. This might open up possibilities of further federalisation of political competition. However,such a federalisation,in itself,does not guarantee either sustainability or democratic consolidation. And in the absence of these two,federalisation might take place only as a by-product of political intrigue.

The writer teaches political science at the University of Pune