Stalin’s Push For Federalism: Symbolic Or Substantive?

Tanvir Aiejaz

Indian federalism’s real challenge is to design institutions in a way that would encourage participatory democracy in terms of self-rule plus shared rule.

Although the much-avowed concept of “cooperative federalism” is often invoked by the Union for political expediency, it gets ruptured when the core of the federal principles is attacked. The core of federalism is the idea of self-rule and shared rule in a multilevel system of governments and governance. Since Independence, India has practised centralised-cooperative federalism, but for the last decade or so, it has shifted to what may be termed “unitarian-cooperative federalism”.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin appears to believe that the Union government is hollowing out the very idea of federalism, by the imposition of a centralised-unitarian-authoritarian governance across the nation, lateralisation of an incredible diversity, and fixation on the monist culture — one nation, one culture, and possibly, one governance. To stave off the tensions in federal relations and to make cooperative federalism meaningful and relevant, Stalin constituted a three-member committee, headed by Kurian Joseph, a retired Supreme Court judge.

The provocation for constituting the high-level committee came from the host of issues that have been affecting Delhi–Chennai relations, such as the question of the state’s fiscal autonomy, the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), National Education Policy (NEP), delimitation, and the overreach of the gubernatorial office. The recommendations of this high-level committee, expected within two years, seem to add a new chapter to the existing federal reform efforts. Hopefully, it will encourage scholars engaged in studying federalism in India to work out a sui generis Indian model of federalism.

Federalism is the series of relationships — financial, legal, political and administrative — between the Union and state governments and between the state governments. It involves the deft handling of the management and coordination of such relationships, basically to accomplish policy goals. India adopted federalism as the modus vivendi of polity and governance, mainly for two purposes. One, to sustain and disseminate the “idea of India”, it was felt that people of different identities should be encouraged to work together for the nation’s progress, while also giving them enough space to preserve their culture and help it flourish. The accommodation of diversity may be a cliché nowadays for most of the political parties, but it is, in essence, the nation’s capacity to create conditions for the deepening of democracy in states and regions, so that citizens feel that their identities are protected and they belong to the nation as a whole. This requires a certain degree of autonomy for states, which may further require thinking afresh in terms of some “principled-asymmetrical federalism”, based on secularism, tolerance, assimilation, reconciliation and composite culture. Two, the architecture of institutional arrangements, based on the “principle of subsidiarity” – authority to be invested at the lowest level of institutional hierarchy – shall have the potential to address the conflicts emanating from the management of diversity, and to yield a more sustainable, stable polity.

Both the purposes of federalism — accommodation of diversity and stable polity through strengthening decentralised governance — seem belied, particularly during the last decade or so, mainly due to overarching centralising tendencies threatening the constitutional division of power and offsetting the guardrails of checks and balances. In this context, Tamil Nadu’s decision to look into the state of federalism has raised a few significant questions: Are federal institutional designs being undermined or regressed due to heavy centralising actions by the Union? Do the states have adequate constitutional powers to safeguard against such centralising tendencies? To what extent are the state’s powers protected by the upper house, by de jure asymmetries, by the Basic Structure doctrine or by finance commissions? Or, even more simply put, is federalism, particularly in practice, a sound, workable model for Indian democracy?

The National Institute for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) was constituted to question the central planning, one-size-fits-all approach, and to look into the federal tensions. But the government of the day seems to have undermined cooperative federalism and has resorted to “punitive federalism”. Stalin recently remarked that “the state government is being forced to fight for even the basic rights from the Union government” and explained how Tamil Nadu has been constantly fighting for more state autonomy, despite the implementation of the Rajamannar Committee’s report (1971) that warned against the state becoming “administrative units of Centre”. For Stalin, both NEET and NEP (2020) are instruments of subordinating and hollowing out of the state’s autonomy, by leveraging the Union’s power in the concurrent list of the Constitution and withholding grants for other policies related to education. His objection to GST is that it causes significant revenue loss to the manufacturing sector, mainly MSMEs, in Tamil Nadu and takes away much of the state’s fiscal autonomy. He is wary of the upcoming delimitation of the parliamentary constituencies in 2026 as it seems to tilt the Lok Sabha representation in favour of Hindi-speaking states of the north.

he Sarkaria (1988) and Punchhi (2010) commissions were the two major efforts undertaken by the Union to look into the power arrangements, functions, and responsibilities between Union and the states. They had emphasised the premise of cooperative federalism as the foundation for improving India’s prosperity, integrity and social development. These commissions, however, failed to focus on the “innovative autonomies” that the states need for self-rule under federal principles, which would further foster cooperative federalism.

Against this backdrop, Indian federalism’s real challenge is to design the federal institutions in a way that would encourage participatory democracy in terms of self-rule plus shared rule.

Tanvir Aeijaz teaches Public Policy and Politics at Ramjas College, University of Delhi and is the honorary vice-chairman at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism, New Delhi

The article was published in The Indian Express as Can M K Stalin’s committee help deepen ‘cooperative federalism’? on April 21, 2025.

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