Short essay: Federalism is best preserved by trust, not by litigation

Federalism is a constitutional design, but its survival depends on a civic practice. The Indian Constitution distributes power across the Union and the states through three legislative lists, four sets of taxes, a council of governors and a chain of high courts, and any of those instruments can be invoked when relations break down. They are, however, instruments of last resort. The healthier life of a federal system lies in the daily, almost invisible work of negotiation between governments — and that work depends on trust, not on writs. India's federalism has always been strongest when its leaders chose conversation over litigation, and weakest in the periods when they chose the reverse.

Consider the most consequential federal reform of the last decade. The Goods and Services Tax demanded a constitutional amendment, a redistribution of taxing power, and the creation of a council with one vote per state and one for the Union. None of this could have been achieved by court order; it required protracted negotiation in which finance ministers from every party traded concerns, made concessions on rates and compensation, and built a consensus that has, despite occasional friction, held. The GST Council remains the best living example of what cooperative federalism looks like when it works — a permanent venue where disagreement is processed by dialogue, not by judgment.

The Finance Commission offers a second example. Every five years it confronts the most explosive question in any federation — who gets how much money — and produces an answer that all states have accepted for seventy-five years. The Commission's authority does not come from coercion. It comes from a process that consults each state, applies transparent formulae, and produces recommendations that successive governments at the Centre have honoured even when they disliked the result. When that trust held, devolution rose. When it began to be eroded — through the growth of cesses and surcharges outside the divisible pool — the relationship has visibly suffered.

The contrast with litigation-driven federalism is instructive. The disputes over the role of the chancellor in state universities, over the discretionary powers of the governor, over the right of state legislatures to compel central assent, have produced a stream of high-court and Supreme Court judgments — but they have not produced political peace. Each ruling settles a procedural question while leaving the underlying political grievance untouched. Litigation, by its design, produces winners and losers; it cannot produce the patient, ongoing accommodation that a federal polity needs from one election to the next.

A reasonable counter-view is that trust, where it is broken, can only be restored through enforceable rulings. If the centre treats opposition-ruled states unequally, or if a governor refuses assent in bad faith, what remains except the courts? The objection has some force, and the Supreme Court has played a crucial role in restraining the worst abuses. But the moments when the court has had to intervene are precisely the moments when federalism's preventive infrastructure failed — when the Inter-State Council went silent, when the Niti Aayog's governing council was avoided, when the GST-style chamber for a particular dispute did not exist. The remedy for litigation is not less court, but more dialogue upstream.

The conclusion follows. India's constitutional design supplies both the dialogic and the adjudicative paths, and a healthy federation relies overwhelmingly on the first. The Inter-State Council should be convened on a calendar, not on demand. The Finance Commission's recommendations should be honoured in full, including a fiscal architecture in which cesses do not crowd out shareable taxes. The Niti Aayog's governing council should be the venue where the prime minister and the chief ministers meet at least twice a year, with substantive agendas. Federalism preserved by trust is not weak federalism; it is the strongest version available, because it builds the habit of accommodation that a writ can never legislate. India's experience of seventy-five years suggests that this is, in the end, the only federalism that lasts.