09/10/2021 - Indian Polity

KEY POINTS

·        Events coinciding with the jubilee of India’s Independence draw attention to the federal structure of India’s Constitution, which is a democratic imperative of multi-cultural India.

·        This built-in structural potential for conflict within and among the units, and that between them and the sovereign state, need imaginative federal craftmanship.

Fault lines

·        The Parliament session, where the Rajya Sabha Chairperson broke down 2021 unable to conduct proceedings despite the use of marshals;.

·        Cross-border police firing by one constituent State against another, inflicting fatalities.

·        Such unfamiliar events of federal democracy are recurrent in India, except their present manifest intensity.

·        Democratic federalism presupposes institutions to ensure equality between and among the units and the Centre so that they coordinate with each other.

·        But India’s federal structure is constitutionally hamstrung by deficits on all these counts, and operationally impaired by the institutional dents.

·        India’s federal structure, underpinned on the colonial ‘1935 Act’ which initiated ‘provincial autonomy’, attempted democratising it by: renaming “Provinces” to autonomous “States”;

·        The Indian Constitution itself has been amended 105 times in 70 years compared with 27 times in over 250 years in the United States.

·        Whenever any party with a massive majority in any state finds itself marginalised in the central legislature, it disrupts proceedings, just as popular issues not reflected in legislative proceedings provoke undemocratic expressions.

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