A New Year, & 75th as a free nation: Let’s do something special

Let’s trace our way back to consensus-building, federalism that accommodates our diversity, becoming a just and democratic polity, a humane society

As we bring down the curtains on the year past, it is nice to remember that 2022 will be a special year, one in which we complete 75 years as an independent nation. It is perhaps a good time to reflect on the state of the Union, and where we are headed as a country. A just and democratic polity requires two principal features: the proper distribution of government power within and among its political entities, and a sustained and pervasive public virtue. This forms the basis to strive towards an equitable and inclusive society.

In India’s context, the idea of federalism is not merely about the balance of power between the Centre and the states, the allocation of duties and responsibilities between them, or even about a progressive Centre encouraging the states to compete and perform better. It, in fact, serves as the institutional framework that provides the basis for inclusiveness, and for building consensus to navigate the plurality of Indian society.

It is important to reflect on the shift from a consensus-based politics to a majoritarian approach over the years from the late 1960s, and the challenges this has thrown up in our efforts at nation-building. It is an opportunity to recognise that federalism is being reconstructed through a variety of measures: statutes, administrative arrangements, and centralisation.

Broadly speaking, federalism can devolve power downward to the states or it can disperse power outward to private actors. The year past will be remembered for the manner in which the farm laws were rushed through, and equally for how the government was compelled by sustained agitation by the big farm lobby to withdraw them. This has set us back on agriculture reforms by several years.

The abjuring of consensus in more recent times began, arguably, with the remarkable election victory from which the Centre’s authority probably crested in 2019, just before the pandemic broke out. But even at its high watermark, the national State apparatus appeared incomplete, contested, and vulnerable. Today, the public entertains doubts on whether the national government can solve complex social problems — unemployment, poverty, hunger and malnutrition, climate change, and agricultural distress — and rightly or wrongly believes that the solutions tried have largely failed. Although, it must be said, the public trust in state governments is somewhat tenuous and arguably less than in the Centre. Taken together though, the trust deficit creates the perception of a kind of pulmonary embolism in the body politic.

The genius of federalism was once an article of faith, as envisaged by the founders and evidenced in the sagacious and prescient Constituent Assembly debates. It was intended to serve both as an instrument of the modern administrative State, and as an institutional arrangement to accommodate the extraordinary diversity of Indian society and the challenges that this diversity poses for national unity.

This diversity-accommodating imperative of federalism receives little attention today. Although the plural nature of Indian society and inter-state differences help to explain the remarkable durability of federalism in India, we still lack a national consensus to decide which of those differences the Centre must encourage, or at least tolerate, and which of them it should limit. Hence the importance of consultations with the states and across the political spectrum. The present configuration of the jurisdiction of states has little to commend it besides history, and the current allocation of powers and responsibilities are skewed excessively in favour of the Centre. India’s history and its remarkable social diversity have their just claims on our political structures and practices.

Federalism is perhaps far from an ideal system, it nevertheless remains a great source of social strength and political cohesion that helps to bind a congeries of disparate states to the nation by accommodating their passionately parochial interests — and each state can lay claim to this without exception — and yet draw the Indianness in them.

India needs an identity based on how our society has evolved; and in forging this identity, our constitutional history is important to more than just a polemical cause. Advancing a homogenising form of Indian nationalism is likely to disrupt the nation-state rather than cement its cultural basis because the Indian identity cannot be unidimensional.

Rabindranath Tagore reminds us of the combined role of the ‘little’ and ‘great’ traditions in shaping what he defined loosely as the Indian nation. India’s diversity, to paraphrase Tagore, was her “nature, and you can never coerce nature into your narrow limits of convenience without one day paying dearly for it.”

If democracy has struck roots in a multi-ethnic society like India, despite the absence of pre-existing conditions that many argue are necessary, it is because of complementary social and political institutions between the Centre and the states, nurtured and sustained by an alert citizenry in the spirit of federalism. India’s democracy does not lend itself to a copybook description; it is a creative democracy that needs to be reinvigorated time and again.

A good way of doing this is through greater dialogue between the Centre and the states, and between the government and its people. There is no other path, going beyond the mere casting of votes, to fostering a shared identity of those who govern and those who are governed. It is a fallacy to assume that democratic conditions automatically maintain themselves. Democracy does sometimes fall on hard times, and to protect it must constitute a daily struggle for all citizens; and in doing so, we must scrutinise claims to our past in the context of the historical present.

We must ring in the New Year with the resolve that we will commit ourselves to the responsibility to secure for all Justice, Liberty, Equality, and foster Fraternity. For, after all, society is responsible for generating the values by which it will live, and to progress towards a just and humane one. In the 75th year of our independence, there is no better tribute that we can pay as the price of freedom.

(The writer is Director, Public Affairs Centre, Bengaluru)

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