Federalism is the genius of holding-together a continent-civilisation

The political scientist Alfred Stepan, in his 1999 essay 'Federalism and Democracy', drew a distinction that ought to be standard equipment for any student of the Indian Constitution. There are 'coming-together' federations, in which previously sovereign units negotiate themselves into a union: the United States in 1787, Switzerland in 1848, Australia in 1901. And there are 'holding-together' federations, in which a single political entity, fearing centrifugal forces, devolves powers to constituent units to keep itself whole: Belgium in 1993, Spain since 1978, and most ambitiously, India in 1950. The Indian Union was not formed by states surrendering sovereignty to a common centre; it was formed by a civilisation negotiating with itself, through the Constituent Assembly, about how to remain together. India's federalism is therefore not American-light; it is its own architecture, asymmetric, cooperative, competitive, and continuously renegotiated.

The constitutional design declares the holding-together character from its opening lines. Article 1 calls India 'a Union of States', not states of the Union. Articles 2, 3, and 4 give Parliament the power to admit, form, alter, and rename States, a power that no American Congress holds over Texas or California. The Seventh Schedule divides legislative competence into the Union, State, and Concurrent Lists. Article 356 permits the imposition of President's Rule, an unusual feature for a federation, but one whose use has been disciplined since the seven-judge Bench in S. R. Bommai v Union of India in 1994 limited it to demonstrable constitutional breakdown. Article 263 enables the Inter-State Council; Article 280 mandates a Finance Commission every five years. Article 368 makes constitutional amendment a process in which states have a say for federal provisions. Each is a thread in a tapestry that, taken whole, is unmistakably Indian.

Article 371 deepens the asymmetric character. Nagaland (371A), Sikkim (371F), Mizoram (371G), Manipur (371C), Goa (371-I), Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (371D and 371J) each receives special provisions tailored to its history. The Sixth Schedule autonomous district councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram preserve customary law and tribal administration. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992 carried federalism down to roughly 2.5 lakh panchayats and 4,500 municipalities. Article 370's special status for Jammu and Kashmir, abrogated on 5 August 2019, was the most-debated instance of asymmetric federalism; its abrogation was upheld by the Supreme Court in In Re: Article 370 on 11 December 2023. The federal map is constantly redrawn but always with constitutional pen.

Fiscal federalism is the bloodstream of this architecture. The 15th Finance Commission, chaired by N. K. Singh and submitting its main report in October 2020, recommended the devolution of 41 per cent of the divisible pool of central taxes to states, a marginal reduction from the 14th Commission's 42 per cent reflecting the carving out of Jammu and Kashmir into Union Territories. The GST Council, constituted under Article 279A in September 2016 and meeting for the first time on 22 September 2017, has held 53 meetings to date. Until 2023, every rate change was decided by consensus, with the Centre carrying one-third of the votes and the states two-thirds. The PM-Gati Shakti National Master Plan, launched on 13 October 2021, aligns Centre-State infrastructure planning across 16 ministries. The State governments' borrowing under Article 293, the FRBM compliance dialogue, and the Centrally Sponsored Schemes restructured after the 14th Finance Commission's recommendations all stitch fiscal federalism together.

Cooperative federalism has been institutionalised since 2015. The NITI Aayog, which replaced the Planning Commission on 1 January 2015, runs a Governing Council that includes all Chief Ministers and Lieutenant Governors, chaired by the Prime Minister. Its Aspirational Districts Programme, launched in January 2018, covers 112 districts identified through a multidimensional index of health, education, agriculture, financial inclusion, and skills, and has produced documented improvements in indicators across cohorts. The Aspirational Blocks Programme, launched in 2023, extends the same competitive-federalism logic to 500 blocks. State rankings on Ease of Doing Business, on School Education Quality Index, on the SDG India Index turn the federal contest into a benchmarked race rather than a zero-sum bargain.

The State practice gives federalism its texture. Kerala's People's Planning Campaign of 1996 devolved 35-40 per cent of State plan funds to panchayats. Tamil Nadu's midday-meal-scheme pioneer of 1956 became the national PM-POSHAN scheme feeding 11.8 crore children. The Mizo Peace Accord of 30 June 1986 transformed a separatist insurgency into a multi-party democracy; the Bodo Accord of 27 January 2020 created the Bodoland Territorial Region; the Naga Framework Agreement of 3 August 2015 remains incomplete but is essentially a federal negotiation. Each accord is federalism doing the work of nation-building.

The counter-argument is sharp. Critics point to Governor activism in non-BJP states, particularly Tamil Nadu and West Bengal between 2021 and 2024, where Bills languished in Raj Bhavans without assent. They point to the Centre's reliance on cess and surcharge, which stood at roughly 22 per cent of gross tax revenue in FY24 against 10 per cent a decade earlier; cesses and surcharges are not shareable under Article 270. They point to the strain on GST compensation, expiring in June 2022, and to single-state Lokayuktas under stress in several states. The S. R. Bommai firewall, the critics argue, is being tested by central-agency footprint, by the politics of Speakers, by the use of money bills, and by the asymmetric application of central law to opposition-ruled states. The 2024 abolition of the National Commission for Backward Classes' state counterparts is cited as further centralisation.

These criticisms deserve serious answers. The Inter-State Council, whose Standing Committee should meet four times a year per the Rules of Procedure, has met patchily; its revival is the single most underrated institutional fix. The Punchhi Commission of 2010 made 273 recommendations on Centre-State relations; barely a third have been considered. The 16th Finance Commission's formula, due by 31 October 2025, should weigh reform without punishing demographic momentum.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, between 1947 and 1949, integrated 562 princely states into the Indian Union with what Mountbatten called 'velvet glove diplomacy'. Jawaharlal Nehru institutionalised federal practice through the Planning Commission, the Inter-State Council, and the language States. B. R. Ambedkar architected the constitutional grammar. Each generation, however, must renegotiate the bargain. Federalism is not a finished sculpture; it is a continuous treaty among Indians. The republic at seventy-six has the longest unbroken democratic experiment in any society of comparable diversity. Its federal genius is not unity in spite of plurality; it is unity through plurality. Holding-together has been, and must continue to be, the operating instruction. The instrument is not perfect; it never was meant to be. It is, however, durable in a way that few federal experiments in human history have managed to be. To keep it durable for the next seventy-five years is the federal task of our generation.