Federalism with a Strong Central Government

It is widely accepted that although India is a federation, the Constitution has deliberately created a strong central government. The reasoning behind this goes back to the circumstances at the time the Constitution was being framed. India is a country of continental scale, with immense social and cultural diversity and serious social problems to address. The framers wanted a federal constitution that could genuinely accommodate this diversity — but they equally wanted a strong centre that could hold the country together and drive social and political change. This need for central strength was not abstract: at independence, India was not simply a set of provinces inherited from British rule; it also included more than 500 princely states that had to be integrated, either into existing States or into newly created ones, and only a reasonably strong centre could manage a task of that scale.

This idea — that constitutions tend to drift toward greater centralisation over time — was expressed directly by T.T. Krishnamachari in the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949. He told the Assembly that the general "drift" in constitutions everywhere had been towards the centre, because circumstances had changed the nature of States themselves: they were moving away from being mere "police states" (concerned only with maintaining law and order) and becoming welfare states, and this shift meant that the ultimate responsibility for the country's economic well-being had become the centre's paramount duty. In other words, as governments took on the much larger job of actively promoting people's welfare and economic development — not just keeping order — the centre naturally ended up holding more power, because it was the centre that bore final responsibility for the results.

Beyond the concern for keeping the country united, the framers of the Constitution also believed that India's socio-economic problems — poverty, illiteracy, and deep inequalities of wealth — demanded coordinated planning that only a strong central government, working together with the States, could provide. So both the desire for unity and the desire for development pushed the framers toward building a strong centre.

The Constitution puts this strong-centre design into practice through several specific provisions. Parliament controls the very existence and territorial integrity of the States themselves — it has the power to create a new State by separating territory from an existing State or by merging two or more States, and it can alter the boundary or even the name of any State, subject to the safeguard that the view of the concerned State's legislature must first be obtained (though Parliament is not bound to follow that view). The Constitution also contains powerful emergency provisions that can turn the ordinarily federal system into a highly centralised one the moment an emergency is declared — during such a period, the concentration of power at the centre becomes fully lawful, and Parliament can make laws on subjects that would normally fall within the States' jurisdiction.

Even in normal times, the central government holds very substantial financial powers and responsibilities. Most of the major revenue-generating sources are under central control, which leaves States largely dependent on grants and financial assistance from the centre. India's early adoption of centralised economic planning added to this: the Planning Commission, appointed by the union government, acted as the coordinating body that supervised how States managed their resources, and the union government's discretion in deciding how much to grant or lend to each State has often been seen as unevenly applied — leading to accusations that States governed by opposition parties were treated less generously.

The Governor's office adds another central check on the States: the Governor has the power to recommend dismissal of a State government or dissolution of the State Assembly, and can also reserve a bill passed by the State legislature for the assent of the President — which gives the central government the ability to delay a State law, examine it closely, and potentially veto it altogether. There are also situations where the central government may legislate on subjects that normally belong to the State List, provided the move is ratified by the Rajya Sabha. …