Federalism is the muscle of a continent-sized democracy

Granville Austin, in his canonical study The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966), described India as a ‘cooperative federation’ — a hyphen, not a wall, between the Union and the States. The framing was deliberate and consequential. India is geographically larger than the European Union, more linguistically diverse than the African Union, and more demographically populous than both combined. The Constituent Assembly debated the federal question through 1947 and 1948, with Ambedkar memorably noting that the Constitution did not use the word ‘federation’ for a reason — it intended a Union of indestructible character but with significant autonomy for the States. The Constitution chose, against the Westminster instinct of unitary sovereignty and against the American instinct of dual federalism, to distribute power across a three-list architecture overseen by an empowered judiciary. Federalism is not a constitutional concession to a restive periphery; it is the muscle that lets a continental democracy hold together while moving. To weaken federalism is to amputate the republic at its joints.

The architectural balance is layered and intricate. Schedule VII partitions legislative competence across the Union List (97 entries), State List (66 entries) and Concurrent List (47 entries), with residuary powers in the Union under Article 248. Article 280 constitutes a Finance Commission every five years to recommend the vertical and horizontal distribution of central taxes; the 15th Finance Commission, which submitted its report in November 2020, devolved 41 per cent of the divisible pool to states, slightly down from the 14th Commission’s 42 per cent after the Jammu and Kashmir reorganisation. The Inter-State Council under Article 263 provides a coordinating forum, though it has met infrequently. The GST Council under Article 279A, constituted on 1 September 2016 by the 101st Constitutional Amendment, is a unique federal innovation: states and the Union sit together with weighted voting (one-third Union, two-thirds states) and consensus-driven decisions on indirect taxation. The 16th Finance Commission, currently deliberating under the chairmanship of Arvind Panagariya, must reconcile growing southern resentment over horizontal devolution formulae with the equity claims of slower-growing northern states.

The stress points are equally instructive and reveal the working tension of the architecture. The Governor’s power under Article 200 to withhold assent to state legislation has been litigated repeatedly; the Supreme Court’s 2024 verdict in State of Tamil Nadu v Governor of Tamil Nadu read deemed-assent into prolonged executive inaction, ruling that the Governor cannot indefinitely sit on bills passed by an elected state legislature. Article 356, intended for genuine constitutional breakdown, was invoked approximately 101 times until 2024 with periods of conspicuous abuse during the 1970s and 1980s; the S R Bommai judgment of 1994 imposed judicial review on such proclamations and elevated federalism to basic structure. The all-India services cadre rules amendment proposal of 2022 triggered an opposition states’ revolt led by West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Krishna and Cauvery water-sharing disputes routinely test inter-state comity. The delimitation question, due in 2026 after the Census, threatens to redistribute Lok Sabha seats sharply against southern states whose family-planning success will have penalised them politically — a paradox the framers did not anticipate.

The cooperative successes are easier to overlook because they work quietly and rarely make the front page. The COVID-19 vaccination drive’s CoWIN-state partnership administered over 220 crore doses through a federally-coordinated, state-implemented architecture between January 2021 and 2024, the largest peacetime logistics effort in human history. The mid-day-meal scheme pioneered in Tamil Nadu under K Kamaraj in the 1960s was nationalised in 1995 and now feeds 118 million children. Gujarat’s diamond and textile clusters, Karnataka’s software economy in Bengaluru, Andhra and Telangana’s pharmaceutical hubs, Maharashtra’s manufacturing base around Pune-Aurangabad, and Tamil Nadu’s automotive corridor have all been state-led industrial strategies enabled by union infrastructure and policy continuity. Kerala’s Kudumbashree Self-Help Group experiment, begun in 1998 with 16,000 neighbourhood groups, was scaled into the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission. NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts Programme of 2018 deployed real-time dashboards on 49 indicators across 112 districts — a federal experiment in competitive cooperation that the 2024 review found had narrowed several inter-district performance gaps.

The counter-view must be honoured. Hyper-federalism can fragment policy capacity and produce coordination failures. Climate response, pandemic preparedness, internal security and macro-prudential financial regulation require national coordination that no state acting alone can supply. The 2020 farm laws controversy illustrated both poles — agriculture is constitutionally a state subject under Entry 14 of List II, but a national market for agricultural produce requires Union-level legal architecture, and the manner of legislation without state consultation triggered the year-long farmers’ protest. The 2024 west-Asia and Red Sea shipping crisis required Union-led naval response; states could not have done it. The right answer is rarely all-Union or all-state; it is structured consultation, transparent fiscal sharing, predictable adjudication of disputes through Inter-State Council and judicial review, and respect for the federal calendar. The European Union, with its principle of subsidiarity articulated in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and its qualified-majority Council, offers one reference point; the United States Constitution’s mature jurisprudence on the Commerce Clause from Gibbons v Ogden (1824) onwards offers another.

The fiscal-federalism literature has matured considerably. Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah, among others, have argued for an enhanced role for the Inter-State Council; the Punchhi Commission report of 2010 recommended specific reforms on Governor’s discretion and Article 356 invocation that remain unimplemented. Australian and Canadian federations operate vertical and horizontal fiscal-equalisation mechanisms India can study. The German Bundesrat’s representation of state governments rather than directly-elected senators is another model worth reading against the design of the Rajya Sabha.

B R Ambedkar, in the Constituent Assembly debate of 4 November 1948, observed that ‘the Union is indestructible though the States are not’. The remark has been quoted to justify centralisation, but a more careful reading suggests the opposite implication: the Union’s indestructibility is sustainable only if the states remain vital, capable of governing, financially solvent and politically respected. Federalism is the muscle, not the skeleton; it must be exercised daily to remain functional, and atrophies when ignored. The agenda is plain enough: strengthen the Inter-State Council with a permanent secretariat; codify the Governor’s discretionary powers through a constitutional amendment or a definitive Supreme Court ruling; depoliticise central-agency operations across state borders through a binding protocol; fund the Finance Commission’s recommendations in full and on time; treat cooperative federalism as the operating system rather than the slogan recited at NITI Aayog Governing Council meetings. A continent-sized democracy walks on federal legs or it does not walk at all.