The Changing Nature of Centre-State Relations in India

The Indian Constitution has not been rewritten in any way that alters the basic distribution of power between the Union and the states since 1950. Yet the same text has produced a centre that dismissed nine state governments in a single stroke, and a centre that could not survive a budget vote without the consent of a party ruling one southern state. Understanding centre–state relations in India therefore means explaining variation without textual change — asking what moves when the words stay still.

The variable that moves: the party system, not the text

The constitutional design is centralised, and that much is settled. What the design cannot explain is why the degree of centralisation has oscillated so violently. The determining variable in the working of Indian federalism has been the party system.

• Identical provisions, opposite behaviour. Article 356 was available in 1955 and in 1995; it was used routinely in one period and became almost unusable in the other, with no amendment in between.
• The text sets the outer limits of what is possible; the party system decides where inside those limits the relationship actually sits. A constitution that permits a strong centre does not compel one.
• Ambedkar anticipated this elasticity when defending the design in the Constituent Assembly.

“The Constitution can be both unitary as well as federal according to the requirements of time and circumstances.” — B.R. Ambedkar

• The point usually missed is that Ambedkar described a capacity, not a prediction. He assumed those requirements would be assessed by a government acting in the national interest; in practice they were assessed by whichever party held the Union, and the assessment tracked party advantage.

Why a parliamentary system distorts federalism where a presidential one does not

• The underlying assumption. A federal division of powers assumes the two levels are genuinely separate decision-makers; a parliamentary executive breaks that assumption, because it survives only through the discipline of a legislative majority.
• Party discipline is the operating principle of parliamentary government, and party organisations are national rather than provincial. Where one party controls both levels, the two governments are two wings of one command structure.
• A presidential system separates the executive from legislative confidence, so an American governor and the president in Washington are independently elected, independently secure, and beyond each other’s whip.
• The consequence: the real federal variable sits outside the Constitution altogether — in the number of effective parties, their geographical spread, and whether the Union government commands a majority of its own.
• The corollary is unattractive but accurate. The more perfectly a parliamentary system works, the less federally it behaves. Cohesion at the centre is bought with subordination in the states.

M.P. Singh’s two axes

M.P. Singh offers the most usable analytical device in the field: the Indian political system runs along two axes simultaneously, and their relative prominence changes.

• The parliamentary axis is the vertical line of authority running from a disciplined national majority through the Union executive down to the states; when prominent, the system behaves as a centralised polity with administrative subdivisions.
• The federal axis is the horizontal line of bargaining between the Union and territorially rooted governments; when dominant, the system behaves as a genuine federation, sometimes more federal than the text requires.
• A single-party majority at the centre makes the parliamentary axis prominent: under Nehru, under Indira Gandhi, and again after 2014.
• Coalition and regionalisation make the federal axis dominant, most obviously between 1989 and 2014.
• The two axes are a ratio rather than alternatives, which is why the shift between them is gradual and reversible rather than a constitutional rupture.
• Singh’s further observation is that cooperative federalism is largely aspirational: what operates is bargaining federalism, in which the centre’s superior resources set the terms and the states’ leverage rises and falls with the arithmetic of the Lok Sabha.

	Parliamentary axis prominent	Federal axis dominant
Party system	Single-party majority	Coalition, regionalised
Dispute settlement	Inside the ruling party	Between governments, and in court
Article 356	Freely used	Politically and judicially costly
Fiscal relations	Discretionary transfers	Formula-based devolution
States’ foreign-policy voice	Negligible	Real, through coalition partners
Periods	1950–67, 1975–77, 1980–89, 2014–24	1989–2014; partly 1967–71 and 2024 onward

Testing the claim that there are only party-to-party disputes

A sharp formulation circulates in the literature: there are no centre–state disputes in India, only party-to-party disputes. It captures a great deal, and it fails in instructive places.

• What it gets right. Friction concentrates where different parties hold the two levels: Governors reserve bills in opposition-ruled states and sign them in allied ones, general consent to the Central Bureau of Investigation has been withdrawn only by opposition governments, and Article 356 was used against opposition ministries far more often than the ruling party’s own.
• It fails, first, because structural grievances survive changes of government. The southern objection to population-weighted devolution, or to delimitation on post-2026 population, is pressed by governments of every colour, because the interest is territorial rather than partisan.
• It fails, second, because some disputes are between states. Cauvery, Krishna, Mahadayi and the Sutlej–Yamuna Link have divided governments of the same party.
• It fails, third, because institutional interest outlives partisanship. A chief minister who becomes prime minister reliably discovers the virtues of a strong centre; a party that demands autonomy in opposition uses central power when it wins it.
• It fails, fourth, because the judiciary is not a party. S.R. Bommai was decided by judges, and its restraint on Article 356 binds every party equally.
• The accurate version. Party alignment is the strongest single predictor of friction, operating on top of structural interests — fiscal, demographic, territorial — that would generate disputes even in a one-party country.

The party system explains the temperature of Indian federalism; it does not explain what the argument is about.

The political economy variable

• A state-directed welfare and planning model strengthens the centre. If decisive investment decisions are made by a national planning body allocating a national pool, states become claimants and implementing agencies, bargaining over shares of someone else’s budget.
• A neo-liberal model strengthens the states. If firms choose locations, the operative levers — land, power, labour administration, clearances, local infrastructure — sit mostly with state governments, and states compete for capital rather than petitioning Delhi for it.
• The reverse holds for the centre. Rolling back the state’s productive role subtracts the very instrument that made the Union dominant, which is why liberalisation was federally consequential quite apart from its economic effects.
• Centralised planning was itself a centralising instrument, not merely an economic technique. The Planning Commission, created by Cabinet resolution on 15 March 1950 with no constitutional or statutory basis, came to determine developmental expenditure while the Finance Commission was left with revenue expenditure — an unelected body allocating funds to elected state governments.
• The qualification that keeps this from being too neat. Liberalisation also created new central instruments — national regulators, conditional borrowing limits, centrally sponsored schemes with matching requirements — so what it gave the states in autonomy over investment it partly took back through fiscal conditionality.

1950–67: federalism conducted inside a single party

The founding period looks unitary in retrospect, but the mechanism was not constitutional coercion. It was that the arena of federal bargaining lay inside the Congress party.

The Congress system

Rajni Kothari’s account of the “Congress system” is the indispensable frame for this phase.

• One party at both levels. A dispute between a chief minister and the Union was a dispute between two Congressmen, resolved by the party’s own hierarchy.
• The Congress was less a party than a system of accommodation — a coalition of factions, regional bosses, castes and interests, within which competition was continuous but contained.
• Opposition parties functioned as parties of pressure rather than of alternative government, influencing policy by working on Congress factions rather than by capturing office.
• The federal consequence is decisive: the machinery of intergovernmental relations was never needed. The Inter-State Council envisaged by Article 263 was not constituted; the Zonal Councils created in 1956 met without resolving anything of weight; the National Development Council ratified plans rather than negotiating them.
• Powerful state leaders were real — Kamaraj, B.C. Roy, Govind Ballabh Pant — but theirs was party power convertible into influence at the centre, not the constitutional power of a state government confronting the Union.
• Nehru’s personal dominance compounded the effect. When he chose to overrule a state, party channels sufficed; when he conceded, as over linguistic reorganisation, the concession looked like statesmanship rather than a state’s victory.

Planning as a parallel channel of authority

• A second executive. The Planning Commission was chaired by the Prime Minister, accountable to no legislature, and encroached on the Finance Commission’s sphere, leaving that body with non-plan revenue expenditure while itself controlling the larger and politically more valuable plan outlays.
• Plan assistance was discretionary before the Gadgil formula of 1969, and discretionary grants survived alongside the formula thereafter, giving the Union a continuous instrument of leverage.
• States became implementing agencies. A state’s development priorities had to be reformulated as a claim on a national plan, in categories the Commission had defined.

Article 356 in the founding decade

• Punjab, 1951 — the first use, after the resignation of the Gopi Chand Bhargava ministry amid factional collapse.
• PEPSU, 1953, and Andhra, 1954 — ministries that had lost their majorities.
• Kerala, 1959 — the standard illustration of political misuse. The E.M.S. Namboodiripad ministry, the first Communist government elected to office anywhere in India, was dismissed after an agitation against its education and agrarian legislation. It had not lost its majority in the assembly.
• The Kerala dismissal set the template for the next three decades: an opposition government, a mobilised street agitation, a Governor’s report describing a breakdown, and a proclamation. The assembly’s confidence was never the test.
• Ambedkar’s assurance to the Constituent Assembly had been categorical.

“I hope such articles will never be called into operation and that they would remain a dead letter.” — B.R. Ambedkar

Fiscal dependence as the quiet foundation

• Low-yielding, inelastic taxes went to the states while the buoyant and elastic ones went to the Union — a vertical imbalance built into the design.
• A third of revenues, two-thirds of spending. States carried most developmental and welfare expenditure, a gap only transfers could close.
• Article 293 makes state borrowing conditional on Union consent wherever a state is indebted to the Union, which in practice has meant always.
• Dependence of this order made confrontation irrational for a state government of the same party, and very costly for one that was not.

1967–89: from bargaining inside the party to confrontation between governments

1967 and the arrival of non-Congress state governments

• Nine states went to non-Congress governments in the 1967 elections — among them Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, West Bengal, Odisha, Madras and Kerala — while the Congress’s Lok Sabha majority was sharply reduced.
• The Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) governments were coalitions of parties with nothing in common but opposition to the Congress, spanning the Jana Sangh, the Socialists, the Communists and Congress defectors.
• Their instability was structural, compounded by mass defections; the Haryana legislator Gaya Lal, who changed sides three times in a fortnight, gave the language its phrase for it.
• Instability had a federal consequence. Every collapsing coalition gave a Governor an occasion to report a breakdown, and the Union a ground for intervention needing no openly political justification.
• State-level assertion became possible for the first time. The DMK in Madras and the Left in West Bengal and Kerala led governments whose base was regional and whose interest in resisting Delhi was permanent, not tactical.

Indira Gandhi and the fracturing of the Congress system

• The Congress split of 1969 destroyed the system Kothari had described, turning a federation of regional bosses into an organisation dependent on one leader’s national appeal.
• Chief ministers were increasingly nominated from Delhi, removing the internal channel through which state interests had been represented.
• This is the crucial mechanism. When the party stopped functioning as the arena of federal bargaining, the disputes did not disappear — they surfaced as intergovernmental conflict, which is what the constitutional instruments were then used to settle.
• The 1971 and 1972 elections restored a large majority, and centralisation resumed with fewer restraints than in the Nehru period, because the internal counterweights were gone.

The Emergency and the 42nd Amendment

• The Emergency, June 1975 to March 1977, suspended the ordinary operation of the federal system and provided the setting for the most far-reaching constitutional revision attempted.
• The 42nd Amendment (1976) moved five subjects from the State List to the Concurrent List: education; forests; weights and measures; protection of wild animals and birds; and administration of justice, including the constitution and organisation of all courts other than the Supreme Court and the High Courts.
• The transfer of education has proved the most consequential single change to the legislative balance, and underlies live disputes over entrance examinations, university governance and language policy.
• Article 257A was inserted, empowering the Union to deploy armed forces to deal with any grave situation of law and order in a state, those forces operating under Union direction rather than state control.
• Entry 2A was added to the Union List at the same time, covering deployment of Union armed forces in a state in aid of the civil power and the powers and jurisdiction of such forces.
• The 44th Amendment (1978) reversed much of the Emergency package and omitted Article 257A with effect from 20 June 1979 — but it did not return the five transferred subjects, and Entry 2A remains. The reversal was partial, and the part not reversed is the part that still generates disputes.

1977 and 1980: the same act performed twice

• In 1977 the Janata government dismissed nine Congress state governments, reasoning that the Congress’s defeat in the Lok Sabha election implied it had lost its mandate in the states as well.
• In 1980 Indira Gandhi, returned to power, dismissed nine non-Congress state governments on identical reasoning.
• The symmetry is the analytically important fact. Two governments of opposed ideology, three years apart, reached for the same instrument on the same argument — evidence about an instrument, not about a party.
• The argument is constitutionally indefensible. A state assembly’s mandate derives from a state election; a party’s national defeat says nothing about whether a state ministry retains the confidence of its own house.
• This is the strongest single piece of evidence for the party-system thesis, because it shows the text operating as a weapon available to whoever holds the centre, with the identity of the holder making no difference.

The rise of autonomy demands

• Regionally concentrated. The demands came from states with a strong linguistic or religious identity and a non-Congress government: Tamil Nadu, Punjab, West Bengal, Assam.
• Remarkably convergent in substance despite their political differences — restriction of Article 356, an end to the Governor’s discretionary powers, subjects returned to the State List, a larger formula-based fiscal share, and a permanent institutional forum. Their content is examined below alongside the official commissions.
• Uniformly dismissed until 1983, when the appointment of the Sarkaria Commission conceded that the question at least existed.
• Two of the movements turned violent — in Punjab from the early 1980s and in Assam over the foreigners’ question — and in both cases the failure to address an autonomy demand while it remained constitutional contributed to its passage into something harder to accommodate.

1989–2014: coalition federalism

The arithmetic of dependence

• No Lok Sabha majority was won in 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2004 or 2009. For a quarter of a century every Union government depended on parties whose base was a single state.
• The National Front, United Front, National Democratic Alliance and United Progressive Alliance all rested on regional partners: the Telugu Desam Party, DMK, AIADMK, Trinamool Congress, Janata Dal (United), Shiromani Akali Dal and Shiv Sena among others.
• Leverage was concrete. A partner with twenty-odd seats could veto a ministry, a portfolio, a legislative proposal, or the use of Article 356 against its own state.
• Article 356 became politically prohibitive, because dismissing a state government meant dismissing a partner or an ally’s rival at the cost of another partner’s support.
• Bargaining extended into foreign policy. The presence of the DMK in the ruling coalition shaped India’s vote at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Sri Lanka in 2012 and 2013 — as clear an indicator of the federal axis as any fiscal statistic.

The institutional consequences

• The Inter-State Council was finally constituted in 1990, by presidential order under Article 263, on the Sarkaria Commission’s recommendation of January 1988 — forty years after the Constitution provided for it, and immediately after the first genuinely coalition government took office. The timing is not coincidental.
• Its record is nonetheless poor. It has met about eleven times in thirty-five years, with a full decade separating the tenth meeting in 2006 from the eleventh in 2016. Its Standing Committee, created at the second meeting on 15 October 1996, was last reconstituted on 19 May 2022.
• S.R. Bommai (1994) collapsed the use of Article 356, removing the instrument that had defined the previous phase.
• The National Development Council retained real weight, because plan approval ran through it and chief ministers therefore had something collective to approve.

The 1991 reforms and the relocation of investment decisions

• The abolition of industrial licensing removed the Union’s power to decide where a factory would be built, transferring the practical determination of industrial location from a central authority to firms — and therefore to whichever state offered better terms.
• States began competing for investment directly, with delegations abroad, investor summits and single-window clearance systems. Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra were the early movers.
• This is the political-economy thesis in operation. The states’ position strengthened not because they were given powers but because the powers they already held became the decisive ones.
• It also produced a new inequality. States with infrastructure, ports, skills and administrative capacity attracted disproportionate investment, so competitive federalism widened inter-state divergence even as it strengthened states.
• Finance Commissions moved in the states’ favour, culminating in the sharp increase in the devolution share recommended by the Fourteenth Finance Commission — a shift hard to imagine from a Union government with a comfortable majority.

The quasi-confederal reading

• Balveer Arora described the trajectory as a movement from quasi-federal towards quasi-confederal — the states’ bargaining power having grown to a point where the classical description of India as federal in form and unitary in spirit no longer fitted.
• The description was an exaggeration, and was meant as one. No state acquired a right to secede, an independent foreign policy or a veto on amendment; what it captured was that practice had travelled further from the text than any reading of the text alone would suggest.
• Arora’s separate warning has aged well. Competitive federalism among very unequal states produces unfair competition and unbalanced development, because states do not start from comparable positions.
• Chief ministers became national figures, several of them plausible prime ministerial candidates, which changed the symbolic hierarchy between the two levels as well as the practical one.

Between 1989 and 2014 the states obtained, without a single amendment, more leverage than the Constituent Assembly ever intended them to have.

2014 onward: the parliamentary axis restored, the frictions relocated

The return of single-party majority

• Single-party majorities returned in 2014 and 2019 for the first time in three decades, restoring the conditions under which the parliamentary axis is prominent.
• Suhas Palshikar has described the emergence of a “BJP system” — a new phase of one-party dominance analogous in structure, though not in ideology or organisation, to the Congress system Kothari analysed: a nationally dominant party setting the terms of competition, with opposition parties reacting to its agenda.
• The federal effect followed the pattern the thesis predicts, with one difference. The instrument of the earlier dominant phase was no longer available, because Bommai had closed it. So the pressure travelled.

Where the friction actually sits

• Fiscal distribution. What is contested is less the share of the divisible pool than what counts as the pool: cesses and surcharges sit outside it, so the pool is now about 81% of gross tax revenue against 89.1% in 2014–15, and effective devolution is well below the notional figure. This is a companion article’s subject; what matters here is that it has become the primary arena.
• The Governor’s office, now the most litigated federal question of the period.
• Central investigative agencies operating in states whose governments dispute their jurisdiction.
• Centrally sponsored schemes with matching requirements that pre-commit state budgets, and branding conditions attaching the Union’s name to expenditure the state partly finances.
• The abolition of the Planning Commission on 1 January 2015 and its replacement by NITI Aayog — more federal in one respect, since an unelected body no longer allocates funds to elected governments, and less useful in another, since an advisory body gives states no forum in which to obtain resources. Discretion over untied transfers moved to the Finance Ministry.
• A summary fair to both sides. The Union of this phase has been more federal in its formal fiscal architecture and less federal in its administrative and institutional conduct than the coalitions that preceded it.

After 2024

• A fractured mandate in 2024 left the Union government dependent on coalition partners rooted in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
• What has changed. Coalition dependence has restored a degree of bargaining absent for a decade, state-specific fiscal claims by partner states have been pressed with visible success, and there is a discernible caution about measures that would alienate a partner’s home state.
• What has not changed. The institutional frictions are structural, not partisan: the Governor’s assent question ran through 2025 and was resolved in the Union’s favour; a confrontation between the Enforcement Directorate and the West Bengal police reached the Supreme Court in January 2026; and the grievance over cesses and surcharges was not met by the Sixteenth Finance Commission’s report of 1 February 2026.
• The honest reading is that coalition dependence moderates federal behaviour without reversing it, because the instruments now in use — fiscal design, agency jurisdiction, gubernatorial discretion — are not the kind a coalition partner can veto in the way it could veto a proclamation dismissing a friendly government.

Phase	Party system	Dominant instrument of friction	Where disputes were settled
1950–67	One-party dominance	Planning allocations; Article 356 against outliers	Inside the Congress party
1967–89	Congress split, non-Congress states	Article 356; the Governor; the 42nd Amendment	Confrontation and autonomy demands
1989–2014	Coalitions, regional parties pivotal	Fiscal shares; coalition bargaining	Cabinet arithmetic and the courts
2014–24	Single-party majority restored	Fiscal design, Governors, central agencies	Litigation and public contestation
2024 onward	Coalition with a dominant party	The same, moderated at the margins	Litigation, with partner states bargaining

Disputes in the legislative sphere

The tilt in the distribution of legislative power

• The Union List is the longest and carries the subjects that matter most for revenue and coercion; the State List holds agriculture, police, public health, land and local government; the Concurrent List is where the two meet, and where the Union prevails.
• Residuary power rests with the Union under Article 248 and Entry 97 — the Canadian rather than the American arrangement — so any subject the drafters did not anticipate, and technology has produced many, falls to the centre by default.
• The 42nd Amendment’s transfers narrowed the State List further, and none of the five subjects has been returned.
• The asymmetry runs deeper than list length. Parliament can legislate on State List subjects in defined circumstances; no state legislature can ever legislate on a Union List subject in any circumstance.

The five routes into the State List

• Article 249 — Parliament may legislate on a State List subject if the Rajya Sabha resolves by a two-thirds majority of members present and voting that it is necessary in the national interest. This is a temporary transfer: the resolution lasts a year, is renewable, and the law lapses six months after it ceases to be in force.
• Article 250 — during a national emergency Parliament may legislate on any State List subject, the law lapsing six months after the emergency ends.
• Article 252 — Parliament may legislate for two or more states whose legislatures request it, and other states may adopt the law later. This is in effect a permanent transfer, because the resulting law can thereafter be amended or repealed only by Parliament. A state can hand a subject over; it cannot take it back.
• Article 253 — Parliament may legislate to implement any international treaty, agreement or convention, or any decision of an international body, regardless of the division of powers.
• Article 356 — during President’s Rule Parliament assumes the state legislature’s powers.
• The complete list matters, because each route differs in duration, trigger and degree of state involvement, and treating them as interchangeable obscures which is actually being used.

The Article 253 problem

• Treaty-making power is not the issue. Every federation gives its union government that power, because external sovereignty is indivisible. The issue is that Article 253 imposes no duty to consult the states whose subjects a treaty touches, and no requirement of legislative ratification.
• The subject matter of treaties has changed beyond recognition. Once defence, boundaries and diplomatic relations; now agriculture, intellectual property in seeds and medicines, services, labour standards, data, forests and emissions — subjects sitting in the State and Concurrent Lists.
• Trade agreements are the immediate example: commitments on agricultural market access, dairy, tariffs and public procurement bind states whose economies they reshape and whose legislatures never voted on them.
• Climate commitments are the second. Contributions on emissions, forest cover and renewable capacity are delivered almost entirely through state action on power, forests, land and transport, with no mechanism obliging the Union to negotiate the domestic burden first.
• The Punchhi Commission proposed a constitutional amendment superseding Article 253, requiring consultation where State List subjects are affected.
• Para-diplomacy — states engaging foreign investors and governments, sometimes with Union facilitation and sometimes without — has grown as an informal substitute for the consultative mechanism that does not exist.

Article 254 and the repugnancy exception

• Article 254(1): where a state law on a Concurrent subject conflicts with a Union law, the Union law prevails and the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy.
• Article 254(2) supplies the exception — a state law reserved for the President’s consideration and assented to prevails in that state, even if repugnant to an earlier Union law.
• A proviso empties much of it out. Parliament may at any time thereafter add to, amend, vary or repeal the state law.
• The exception is politically gated. Whether a state’s law survives depends on whether the President — that is, the Union Council of Ministers — chooses to assent, converting a constitutional entitlement into central discretion. The gate was visibly used during the farm laws episode, when Punjab, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh passed counter-legislation and reserved it for assent that never came.

Articles 200 and 201: the Governor’s reservation of bills

• Article 200 gives a Governor presented with a bill four options: assent; withhold assent; return a bill other than a money bill for reconsideration, after which assent shall not be withheld; or reserve the bill for the President’s consideration.
• Article 201 then leaves the President free to assent or withhold, with a power to direct the Governor to return the bill — after which the President is still not obliged to assent.
• No time limit is prescribed anywhere in either article. The first proviso to Article 200 says a returned bill must be sent back “as soon as possible”, and that is the whole of the discipline. The silence is the problem.
• The discretion has been exercised arbitrarily. Maharashtra’s organised-crime legislation of 1999 received assent; the comparable Gujarat legislation was held up for over a decade and obtained assent only in 2019, after the political complexion of the Union government had changed. Two near-identical statutes, two fates, and the discriminating variable was not legal.
• Bills have remained pending for years and in some cases decades, with no obligation on anybody to give reasons or state a timetable.
• The federal consequence is severe. An indefinite hold by a Union appointee on the enactments of the only body directly elected by a state’s people suspends parliamentary democracy there, without any of the safeguards attending Article 356.

The assent crisis and its resolution

• Five states were involved — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, West Bengal and Telangana — all with governments opposed to the party holding the Union.
• The subject matter was frequently university governance: bills removing the Governor as Chancellor of state universities, which made the confrontation self-referential, since the officeholder was asked to assent to a reduction of his own powers.
• State of Punjab v. Principal Secretary to the Governor of Punjab (November 2023), decided by a bench led by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, held that a Governor who withholds assent must return the bill with a message for reconsideration and cannot simply sit on it; an unelected head of state cannot use limited constitutional powers to obstruct the legislative process.
• State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu (April 2025), decided by Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan, went further: no absolute veto and no pocket veto under Article 200; prescribed timelines for action; and, invoking Article 142, ten long-pending Tamil Nadu bills treated as having received deemed assent.
• A Presidential Reference under Article 143 followed on 13 May 2025, placing fourteen questions on Articles 200 and 201 before the Supreme Court.
• In Re: Assent, Withholding or Reservation of Bills (20 November 2025) — a five-judge bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai, with Justices Surya Kant, Vikram Nath, P.S. Narasimha and A.S. Chandurkar — answered it. Courts cannot prescribe timelines, because the articles are framed to allow elasticity; “deemed assent” is contrary to the Constitution, and Article 142 cannot supply a remedy the text excludes; the discharge of functions under Articles 200 and 201 is not justiciable as such. Questions 12 and 14 were left unanswered.
• One narrow opening remains. The opinion accepted that a Governor has no power to postpone a bill indefinitely, and that prolonged, unexplained and indefinite inaction frustrating the legislative process is open to limited judicial intervention — a declaration, not a substituted decision.
• In effect the advisory opinion reversed the operative core of the April 2025 judgment.
• The analytical consequence. The constitutional route to protecting states from gubernatorial delay has narrowed, leaving convention and political pressure to do the work — precisely the resources a state facing a hostile centre has least of. A safeguard that depends on the good faith of the party it restrains is not a safeguard.

Contested statutes: where the legislative dispute has actually been fought

• The farm laws (2020–21). Three central Acts of September 2020 rested on Entry 33 of the Concurrent List — trade and commerce in, and production, supply and distribution of, foodstuffs. States objected that agriculture (Entry 14) and agricultural markets (Entry 28) are State List subjects, and that using a Concurrent entry to restructure state market regulation was a colourable exercise. Repealed in December 2021, the episode is at once the strongest recent evidence of central legislative overreach and of the states’ capacity to resist it.
• NEET and the Tamil Nadu exemption bills. Education moved to the Concurrent List in 1976, and a single national entrance examination follows from that transfer. Tamil Nadu’s objection is that a common examination favours candidates who can buy coaching and disadvantages state-board students from rural schools. Its exemption bill, reserved for the President, was refused assent on 4 March 2025, and the state has challenged that refusal — the 42nd Amendment’s transfer still operating half a century later.
• The National Education Policy and the three-language question. Language policy touches identity more directly than any other subject, and Tamil Nadu’s refusal of a formula it regards as Hindi imposition has been accompanied by a dispute over central school-education funds withheld pending its signing of a scheme memorandum. The fiscal instrument secures compliance on a policy the Union cannot simply legislate.
• The pattern across all three. The Union’s reach into state subjects runs through the Concurrent List and conditional finance rather than the dramatic instruments of Part XVIII, and is resisted through counter-legislation, litigation and non-cooperation rather than the forums the Constitution provides.

Disputes in the administrative sphere

India is an executive federation rather than a legislative one: the Union legislates and the states implement. That interdependence is what makes administrative relations, not legislative ones, the site of the most serious disputes.

Articles 256, 257 and 365: the chain of compliance

• Article 256 obliges every state to exercise its executive power so as to ensure compliance with laws made by Parliament, and empowers the Union to give such directions as appear necessary for that purpose.
• Article 257 goes further: a state’s executive power shall not be exercised so as to impede or prejudice the Union’s, and the Union may direct a state on communications of national or military importance and on the protection of railways.
• Article 365 supplies the sanction. Where a state fails to comply with a Union direction, it is lawful for the President to hold that a situation has arisen in which the government of the state cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution.
• The three together form a chain: a duty of compliance, a power of direction, and non-compliance converted into a ground for dismissal. There is no requirement that the direction be reasonable, no forum in which to contest it before it binds, and no proportionality between the failure and the consequence.
• Article 355 — the duty to protect every state against external aggression and internal disturbance and to ensure its government runs in accordance with the Constitution — has been read both as a limitation on Union action and as an independent source of authority for it, and the ambiguity has never been resolved.
• Article 257A’s brief life matters because it was deleted — the one clear instance in which an administrative encroachment made during the Emergency was reversed.

Article 356: the promise and the record

• A colonial inheritance. The provision came from Section 93 of the Government of India Act, 1935, under which a colonial Governor could assume all the powers of a provincial government. Transplanting a colonial emergency power into a democratic constitution was the Constituent Assembly’s objection, and Ambedkar’s answer was that it would never be used.
• The record: President’s Rule has been imposed on roughly 134 occasions across states and union territories since 1950.
• The distribution over time is the analytically significant fact, not the total: moderate use in the first two decades, extremely heavy use between 1971 and 1990, and a sharp fall since 1994.
• Manipur and Uttar Pradesh have each been placed under President’s Rule about ten times. Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Puducherry have spent the longest cumulative periods under it; Chhattisgarh and Telangana have never been placed under it.
• The grounds actually used fall into four categories, of which only the first two are constitutionally respectable:
  • Genuine political instability — hung assemblies, mass defections, repeated ministerial collapse.
  • Breakdown of law and order of a severity the state government could not or would not address.
  • Allegations of corruption or maladministration, which are matters for the electorate and the courts.
  • Mala fide dismissal of opposition governments — the largest category by volume across 1967–89.
• The most recent imposition was in Manipur on 13 February 2025, after the Chief Minister’s resignation amid ethnic violence continuing since May 2023, and was revoked on 4 February 2026. It falls squarely into the second category and shows the provision retains a legitimate use.

Period	Character of use	What changed
1950–67	Occasional; mostly ministerial collapse, with Kerala 1959 the political exception	One party at both levels made the instrument unnecessary
1967–71	Rising; SVD instability supplied plausible grounds	Non-Congress state governments appeared
1971–89	Heaviest use of the entire period, including 1977 and 1980	The Congress system’s collapse removed intra-party settlement
1989–94	Continuing, but politically costly	Coalition partners could veto action against their states
1994 onward	Sharp collapse in frequency	Bommai made proclamations justiciable and required a floor test

S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994)

The nine-judge decision of 11 March 1994 is the most consequential federalism case in Indian constitutional history, and its holdings should be known individually rather than as a slogan.

• Federalism is a basic feature of the Constitution. The states are not administrative agencies of the Union; their existence within their sphere is protected against amendment.
• A proclamation under Article 356 is justiciable. The court will not sit in appeal on the President’s satisfaction, but will examine whether it was formed on relevant material and whether that material has a rational nexus with the action.
• The material must be a “speaking document” — self-evident and capable of examination, not a bare conclusion in a Governor’s report. Article 74(2) bars inquiry into ministerial advice, but does not immunise the material on which that advice rested.
• Majority must be tested on the floor of the house. A Governor’s subjective assessment is not a substitute for a vote — a holding that alone removed the most commonly used pretext of the previous three decades.
• No dissolution before parliamentary approval. The assembly may only be suspended until both Houses approve the proclamation — which preserves the remedy, since a dissolved assembly cannot be revived by a later judgment while a suspended one can.
• The court may restore a dismissed government, reviving the assembly and reinstating the ministry, if the proclamation is struck down.
• Secularism is a basic feature, and a state government acting against it may validly be dismissed — the ground on which the dismissals following the events of December 1992 were upheld.
• The internal tension is worth noting. Bommai both narrowed Article 356 and validated a substantive, contested political ground for its use. It is not simply a pro-state decision; it substituted judicial supervision for political discretion.
• Its effect was immediate and permanent, and it is the clearest demonstration available that a judicial holding can change federal practice without any change to the text.

After Bommai: the doctrine tested

• Rameshwar Prasad v. Union of India (2006). The dissolution of the Bihar assembly in 2005, on a Governor’s report that defections were being engineered, was held unconstitutional and mala fide; the court declined to restore it because fresh elections were under way — a practical limit on the remedy even where the principle is vindicated.
• Nabam Rebia v. Deputy Speaker (2016) and Arunachal Pradesh. The court quashed the Governor’s orders advancing the assembly session and setting its agenda, holding that Articles 163 and 174 do not permit a Governor to summon, prorogue or fix the business of the house on his own initiative against ministerial advice. Restoring the status quo ante made Arunachal Pradesh the first case of a dissolved assembly and dismissed government revived by judicial order. Uttarakhand followed the same year.
• Shivraj Singh Chouhan v. Speaker, Madhya Pradesh Legislative Assembly (2020). A Governor may direct a floor test where objective material suggests loss of confidence, and the Speaker’s control over the house does not extend to preventing one. The decision completes Bommai‘s logic: if the floor is the only test of majority, it cannot be indefinitely avoided by either side.
• The trajectory across these cases is a court progressively converting a political question into a procedural one — not asking whether a government deserves to govern, but insisting the question be answered by a vote in the assembly.

The Governor’s office

• Appointment is by the President on the advice of the Union Council of Ministers, with no requirement of consultation with the state.
• Article 156 provides that a Governor holds office during the pleasure of the President — a doctrine with no procedural safeguards, no requirement of reasons and no effective minimum tenure, notwithstanding the nominal five-year term. Governors have been removed en bloc following changes of government at the centre.
• Article 163 gives the Governor discretion where the Constitution requires him to act in his discretion, and makes the question whether a matter falls within that discretion non-justiciable in terms — the textual foundation of much contested conduct.
• Where the discretion bites: government formation in a hung assembly; summoning, proroguing and dissolving the assembly; ordering or refusing a floor test and fixing its timing; reserving bills under Article 200; reporting to the President under Article 356; and acting as Chancellor of state universities under state law.
• The Chancellor’s role has produced the most sustained recent confrontations, in Kerala over university appointments and in Tamil Nadu over bills replacing the Governor with a government nominee. It is a state-law function, not a constitutional one, which is why the states’ response has been legislative.
• The Sarkaria prescriptions: an eminent person from outside the state, not active in politics in the recent past, appointed after consultation with the Chief Minister, with the five-year tenure not disturbed except for compelling reasons.
• The Punchhi prescriptions go further: appointment through a committee of the Prime Minister, Home Minister, Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Chief Minister; deletion of the doctrine of pleasure; removal only by impeachment by the state legislature; a bar on active politics for two years before appointment; and a six-month limit on the decision on bills.
• Neither set has been implemented in binding form, which is why the office continues to generate litigation rather than being settled by convention.

All India Services

• Article 312 permits the creation of All India Services common to the Union and the states, on a Rajya Sabha resolution supported by two-thirds of members present and voting — a rare instance in which the states’ chamber is genuinely constitutive.
• A colonial legacy descended from the Indian Civil Service, and genuinely unusual: no other major federation staffs its provincial administrations with officers recruited, trained and controlled by the federal government.
• Ambedkar defended it as a unifying device — a national cadre would hold the country together, maintain standards, and give the Union hands in every district. A deliberate design choice, not an oversight.
• The difficulty lies in where disciplinary authority sits. Officers serve under a state government but are appointed by the Union, and the ultimate power of removal rests with the Union. A Chief Minister may suspend an officer; he cannot remove one.
• Officers suspended by a state have been restored to the same post by the Union, which converts a formal ambiguity into a demonstration of where real accountability lies.
• Two consequences follow. Officers can behave as agents of the Union inside a state administration, and the services themselves become politicised, since a career depends on which government one pleases.
• T.S.R. Subramanian v. Union of India (2013) directed the constitution of Civil Services Boards at both levels to recommend transfers and postings, a minimum tenure in a post, and the recording of oral instructions in writing so that civil servants are not bound by undocumented political direction.
• Compliance has been patchy. Boards exist on paper in many states, minimum tenure is widely disregarded, and transfers remain a routine instrument of political management — a direction resting on the goodwill of those it constrains having predictable results.
• The 2021 draft IAS (Cadre) Rules amendment proposed to strengthen the Union’s hand over central deputation, allowing it to require officers to be placed at its disposal and providing that an officer would stand relieved if a state did not act in time. Chief Ministers across parties objected that this would destroy states’ control over their own administration, and it was not notified in that form — small evidence that state resistance can still stop a central administrative measure.
• The defensible position on the institution as a whole is that the All India Services are simultaneously the most effective integrationist instrument in the Constitution and a standing derogation from the states’ control over their own executive.

Deployment of central armed police forces

• Public order and police are State List subjects (Entries 1 and 2), placing primary responsibility for internal security with the states.
• Entry 2A of the Union List, inserted by the 42nd Amendment, covers deployment of any Union armed force in a state in aid of the civil power and the powers, jurisdiction, privileges and liabilities of its members while so deployed.
• Article 355 supplies the constitutional basis for Union action, as a duty to protect every state against internal disturbance.
• The first objection is to suo motu deployment — despatch of central forces without a request from, and sometimes over the objection of, the state government. The Supreme Court has held that deployment in aid of the civil power does not by itself violate federalism, since it does not displace the state government.
• The second objection is more precise and less often noticed. The powers, privileges, immunities and liabilities of central force personnel while deployed are determined exclusively by Parliament, so a state answerable to its own electorate for what happens on its territory has no say in the terms on which armed personnel operate there.
• The demand is for consultation, not a veto — and the Punchhi compromise, permitting short-duration deployment in communal situations with post-facto consultation, was an attempt to codify that balance.

Central investigative agencies

• The Central Bureau of Investigation has no statute of its own. It functions under the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, which is why its jurisdiction is territorially limited.
• Section 6 of that Act requires the consent of the state government before the agency’s powers and jurisdiction are extended to any area within that state.
• “General consent” is the standing blanket permission that states historically gave to avoid case-by-case clearance. Withdrawing it does not expel the agency; it means specific consent is needed for each case, or a court order.
• Eleven states had withdrawn general consent by 2024 — West Bengal, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tamil Nadu, with Karnataka joining in September 2024. Maharashtra withdrew in 2020 and restored consent after a change of government in 2022, which tells its own story about what the instrument tracks.
• The ruling of 10 July 2024 in West Bengal’s suit is the most important development here. Justices B.R. Gavai and Sandeep Mehta held the suit under Article 131 maintainable, rejecting the Union’s contention that the CBI is not the Government of India for that purpose: on the scheme of the 1946 Act, the agency’s establishment, powers, extension of jurisdiction and superintendence all vest in the Government of India. The merits remain undecided, but the ruling opens a route for states to litigate central agency conduct as a federal dispute rather than an ordinary criminal matter.
• The Enforcement Directorate presents a harder problem, because it needs no consent at all. The Prevention of Money Laundering Act is central legislation, and a money-laundering investigation is predicated on a scheduled offence the state police is very often already investigating — so the agency enters a state investigation without any of the consent architecture governing the CBI.
• Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India (2022) upheld the core of that statutory scheme, including the stringent twin conditions for bail, the admissibility of statements recorded by officers, and the non-supply of the agency’s internal case record to the accused. The federal significance is a wide, consent-free central investigative jurisdiction over conduct that overlaps with state policing.
• The friction has escalated into direct institutional confrontation. In January 2026 the Supreme Court stayed FIRs registered by the West Bengal police against Enforcement Directorate officers over searches in Kolkata, issuing notice to the state’s Chief Minister, Director General of Police and the Kolkata Police Commissioner. Two law-enforcement arms of the two levels were investigating each other — which is what happens when a federal jurisdictional dispute has no forum in which to be settled.

The commissions on centre–state relations

Every serious attempt to settle the federal question in India has produced a report, and almost none has produced a constitutional amendment. The pattern of what was recommended, and what was done with it, is itself an argument.

Administrative Reforms Commission (1969)

• The study team on centre–state relationships, headed by M.C. Setalvad, produced the earliest official examination of the question, feeding into the first Administrative Reforms Commission’s report on the subject in 1969.
• Two central recommendations: an Inter-State Council under Article 263, and restraint in the use of Article 356.
• It rejected structural change, holding that the existing distribution of powers was adequate and the problem lay in the manner of its exercise. This became the default posture of every official inquiry that followed.
• It was addressing 1967, not 1950. It reported in the immediate aftermath of the first non-Congress state governments, which is why it chose the two subjects the new configuration had made urgent.

Rajamannar Committee (1969)

• Appointed by the DMK government of Tamil Nadu in 1969 — the first state-commissioned inquiry into the federal question — and chaired by P.V. Rajamannar, former Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, with A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar and P. Chandra Reddy. It reported in 1971.
• Its diagnosis identified four sources of centralisation: the constitutional provisions themselves; one-party dominance at both levels; the inadequacy of the states’ fiscal resources; and the role of the Planning Commission. The second element anticipates the party-system thesis by decades.
• Its recommendations were far-reaching: deletion of Articles 356, 357 and 365; removal of the provision that state ministers hold office during the Governor’s pleasure; transfer of subjects from the Union and Concurrent Lists to the State List; residuary powers to the states; a permanent Inter-State Council; a permanent Finance Commission; abolition of the Planning Commission in favour of a statutory body; and the phasing out of the All India Services.
• The Union did not act on it, and it was never placed before Parliament. Its significance is that it converted a political grievance into a drafted constitutional programme, giving every later autonomy demand a template.

Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973)

• Adopted by the Akali Dal at Anandpur Sahib in 1973 and reaffirmed in revised form at Ludhiana in 1978, it combined religious, political and economic demands in a single document.
• Its federal content was an autonomy demand, not a secessionist one. It proposed confining the Union to defence, foreign affairs, currency and communications, with all remaining powers to the states — and framed this as a demand for all Indian states, not for Punjab alone.
• Its Punjab-specific demands were the transfer of Chandigarh, the merger of Punjabi-speaking areas, and a revised share of river waters.
• It was read as a secessionist charter by the Union government, and that reading hardened both sides. The Akali leadership rejected the characterisation explicitly.

“The Sikhs have no designs to get away from India… they simply want to live within India as Sikhs, free from all direct and indirect interference.” — Harchand Singh Longowal

• The lesson is about the cost of misreading an autonomy demand. A demand for constitutional restructuring, treated as a threat to territorial integrity, is denied the channel through which it might have been settled — and the space it vacates is occupied by people with less accommodating aims.

West Bengal Memorandum (1977)

• Published by the newly elected Left Front government of West Bengal, it is the most radical of the state documents.
• It demanded that “Union” be replaced by “federal” in the Constitution — a symbolic demand with real consequences, since Article 1’s language carries Ambedkar’s reasoning that the Union is not the product of an agreement and no state may secede.
• It would have confined the centre to defence, foreign affairs, currency, communications and economic coordination, with all other subjects including residuary powers going to the states.
• It sought repeal of Articles 356, 357 and 360, abolition of the All India Services, mandatory state consent for the creation or reorganisation of states, equal powers for the Rajya Sabha with the Lok Sabha, and 75% of total central revenues for the states.
• The Union rejected it entirely. Its lasting effect was to place the fiscal demand — a defined and large share of central revenues rather than discretionary grants — permanently on the agenda.

Sarkaria Commission (1983–88)

• Appointed on 9 June 1983 under Justice R.S. Sarkaria, with B. Sivaraman and S.R. Sen. Its term was extended four times; it reported in 1988 with 247 recommendations, of which roughly 180 have been implemented in some form.
• Its framing proposition is the one most often quoted and most often misused. It rejected radical restructuring and held that a strong centre is not incompatible with strong states — the two are not in a zero-sum relationship, and the problem is the manner in which central powers are exercised rather than their existence.
• On Article 356: to be used only as a last resort, after all alternatives fail; a prior warning to the state government wherever feasible; the proclamation and the Governor’s report to be laid before Parliament; reasons to be made public.
• On the Governor: an eminent person from outside the state, not recently active in politics, appointed after consultation with the Chief Minister, with a five-year tenure not disturbed except for compelling reasons, and clear guidelines for government formation in a hung assembly.
• On the Inter-State Council: a permanent body under Article 263 with an independent secretariat, charged with the functions in clauses (b) and (c) of that article other than socio-economic planning. This is the one major recommendation that was implemented, in 1990.
• On legislative relations: residuary powers other than taxation to move to the Concurrent List, with residuary taxation staying with Parliament, and consultation with the states before Parliament legislates on a Concurrent subject.
• On planning: the National Development Council to be renamed the National Economic and Development Council and given statutory backing.
• On the All India Services: to be strengthened, not phased out, and further such services created — a direct rejection of the Rajamannar and West Bengal positions.
• What was implemented and what was not. The Inter-State Council was constituted and several procedural and fiscal recommendations absorbed; those constraining the Union’s discretion — the Governor’s appointment and tenure, prior warning before Article 356, consultation over Concurrent legislation — were not given binding form. Recommendations requiring administrative action were adopted; those requiring the centre to give up leverage were not.

National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (2000–02)

• Constituted on 22 February 2000 under Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah, reporting on 31 March 2002.
• On Article 356: the state should be given an opportunity to explain its position and correct the situation before the provision is invoked, wherever possible.
• On the Governor: appointment by a committee of the Prime Minister, Home Minister, Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Chief Minister — the formulation Punchhi later adopted.
• On inter-state trade: a statutory body under Article 307 to give effect to Part XIII, an area of the Constitution that has remained almost entirely unimplemented.
• On treaty-making: it recorded the grievance that the Union enters into treaties touching State List subjects without prior consultation.
• On the Concurrent List: disaster and emergency management to be added — a recommendation whose relevance became obvious two decades later.

Punchhi Commission (2007–10)

• Appointed on 27 April 2007 under Justice M.M. Punchhi, a former Chief Justice of India; it submitted a seven-volume report in 2010.
• A localised emergency, allowing the Union to act in a district or part of a state rather than assuming the government of the whole state — the single most imaginative recommendation in the literature, because it decouples the response to a local breakdown from the dismissal of an elected government.
• A six-month time limit and a fixed procedure for the Governor’s decision on a bill. Had this been enacted, the litigation of 2023–25 would not have been necessary.
• On the Governor’s office: appointment by a committee including the Chief Minister; deletion of the doctrine of pleasure; removal only by impeachment by the state legislature; a bar on active politics for two years before appointment; and a clear order of preference for inviting a claimant to form a government.
• On treaties: a constitutional amendment superseding Article 253, requiring consultation where State List subjects are affected and a larger state role in negotiation.
• On the Concurrent List: concurrence rather than mere consultation — the Union should ordinarily secure the states’ agreement, through the Inter-State Council, before legislating on a Concurrent subject.
• On internal security: a National Integration Council with mandatory annual meetings, and a narrow power to deploy forces in a communal situation for a short period without prior state consent, followed by consultation.
• Implementation: effectively none of the constitutional recommendations. The report was placed before the Inter-State Council, which took up its recommendations in November 2017, and there the matter has largely rested.

The contemporary echo

• Tamil Nadu constituted a high-level committee on 15 April 2025, chaired by Justice Kurian Joseph, with K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty and M. Naganathan — the first state-appointed inquiry of this kind since Rajamannar in 1969.
• Part I of its report was submitted on 16 February 2026, with further parts in preparation, its stated objective being not to weaken the Union but to “right-size” it, restoring to the states the autonomy required for effective governance.
• The recurrence is the point. A state government appointing its own commission is a signal that the official channels — the Inter-State Council above all — are not performing the function they were created for.

Why so little was implemented

• The commissions were appointed by the Union, reported to the Union, and recommended reductions in the Union’s own leverage. No government has an incentive to disarm itself.
• What was adopted cost the centre nothing — procedural improvements, consultative machinery, data sharing — while recommendations touching Article 356, the Governor’s appointment and treaty-making were left alone.
• Amendment requires the very majority whose behaviour is being constrained. A party with the numbers to amend the Constitution has by definition the numbers that make the parliamentary axis prominent, and therefore the least reason to want the amendment.
• The states have never bargained collectively. Autonomy demands have been raised state by state and party by party, so the centre has faced separable claims rather than a bloc. The Joint Action Committee of southern and allied states formed in March 2025 over delimitation and devolution is the first serious attempt at the opposite approach.
• The judiciary filled the gap the commissions could not. What Sarkaria recommended about Article 356 in 1988 and the Union declined to enact, the Supreme Court substantially imposed in 1994. The change that actually happened came from a court, not from a commission or an amendment.

Body	Year	On Article 356	On the Governor	Structural position
ARC (Setalvad)	1969	Restraint in use	Not central	No restructuring; Inter-State Council
Rajamannar	1971	Delete 356, 357, 365	End tenure at pleasure	Radical: powers to the states
Anandpur Sahib	1973	Implied removal	Not addressed	Union confined to four subjects
West Bengal Memorandum	1977	Repeal 356, 357, 360	Not central	“Union” to “federal”; 75% of revenues
Sarkaria	1988	Last resort, prior warning	Outsider; consult the CM	Strong centre and strong states
NCRWC	2002	Opportunity to explain first	Selection committee	Incremental
Punchhi	2010	Localised emergency	Impeachment; six-month limit	Concurrence; amend 253

Judicial umpiring

From denial to protection

• State of West Bengal v. Union of India (1963) is the starting point, and emphatically not a states’-rights decision. Upholding Parliament’s power to acquire coal-bearing land vested in a state, the majority held the Constitution not federal in the traditional sense, the states not sovereign, and Union legislative power extended to state property. Justice Subba Rao’s dissent, insisting on the states’ autonomy within their sphere, was the road not taken.
• The intervening decades produced no comparable doctrine, largely because the political system was not generating the disputes that would have required one. A court cannot develop a federalism jurisprudence in the absence of federal litigation.
• S.R. Bommai (1994) is the pivot. Federalism became a basic feature, the political-question doctrine was set aside for Article 356, and a procedural test replaced executive assessment. The court took over the function the Constitution had assigned to a convention that never developed.
• Government of NCT of Delhi v. Union of India (2018 and 2023) extended the reasoning to a differently situated unit. The 2018 Constitution Bench held the Lieutenant Governor bound by the elected government’s advice except on reserved subjects; the 2023 bench held that the elected government controls services outside the excepted fields, on the principle that an elected government must control the administration that implements its policy. That the ruling was displaced by central legislation shortly afterwards is part of the story, not a refutation of it.
• The advisory opinion of 20 November 2025 marks a retreat. Having made Article 356 justiciable in 1994, the court declined to do the same for Articles 200 and 201, holding that the discharge of those functions is not justiciable as such and that Article 142 cannot supply a remedy the text excludes.
• The trajectory is not a straight line towards greater protection of the states. It runs from denial in 1963, to strong protection where the danger was greatest in 1994, to extension of the principle to executive control in 2018 and 2023, to a self-imposed limit where the text is silent in 2025. The middle three share a willingness to protect an elected state government’s ability to govern; the last shows that the willingness stops where the remedy would require the court to write a rule the Constitution does not contain.
• The Bommai floor is nonetheless holding. No court has resiled from federalism as a basic feature, and no Union government has attempted to return to the practice of the 1970s.

Article 131 and its revival

• Article 131 gives the Supreme Court exclusive original jurisdiction in disputes between the Union and one or more states, or between states, where the dispute involves a question on which the existence or extent of a legal right depends.
• It was little used for decades, because states preferred political channels and the legal-right requirement was read restrictively.
• Kerala’s suit challenging the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, filed in January 2020, was the first high-profile revival, raising the unresolved question whether Article 131 extends to challenges to legislation as opposed to disputes over legal rights.
• Chhattisgarh’s suit challenging the National Investigation Agency Act raised the same question from the other end of the political spectrum, and on a statute enacted by a government its own party had led — a reminder that the interest is institutional rather than partisan.
• State of Kerala v. Union of India (2024) concerned the net borrowing ceiling imposed on states under Article 293 and the treatment of state-enterprise and public-account liabilities as part of a state’s borrowing. The court declined interim relief in April 2024, holding that Kerala had over-utilised its fiscal space, but referred the substantial questions to a five-judge Constitution Bench: the interpretation of Articles 131 and 293, whether Article 293 confers an enforceable right to borrow, whether state-enterprise and public-account liabilities fall within Article 293(3), and the scope of judicial review over fiscal policy.
• State of West Bengal v. Union of India (10 July 2024) held the state’s suit over the CBI’s operation without general consent maintainable.
• The significance of the revival is procedural but substantial. Article 131 converts a political grievance into a justiciable dispute between governments, giving the states a forum they otherwise lack — the Inter-State Council having failed to become one — and explaining why so much of the federal argument now happens in a courtroom.

The states litigate because the forum designed for them to negotiate in has met eleven times in thirty-five years.

Assessment: does the working confirm the centralising tendencies?

The case that it does

• The design is centralising, and practice matched it for four decades. A longer Union List, residuary powers with the Union, Article 3, an appointed Governor, All India Services and Article 356 are not incidental features.
• President’s Rule has been imposed roughly 134 times, overwhelmingly against opposition governments during the period when it was freely available, on grounds unrelated to constitutional breakdown.
• The 42nd Amendment’s transfers were never reversed, and education continues to generate disputes half a century later.
• Fiscal dependence is structural. States raise about a third of revenues and spend about two-thirds; cesses and surcharges outside the divisible pool shrink their entitlement; Article 293 conditions their borrowing on Union consent.
• The instruments have multiplied rather than diminished — central agencies, conditional scheme finance, national regulators and treaty commitments all give the Union reach the drafters never contemplated.
• The reform record is barren. Four major inquiries over forty years produced no constitutional amendment restraining central power.

The case that it does not

• The same text has produced markedly different behaviour, the strongest argument against a purely structural reading. If the text determined the outcome, 1975 and 1995 would have looked alike.
• Article 356’s use collapsed after 1994 and has not recovered, notwithstanding a decade of single-party majority government.
• The coalition decades gave states leverage the drafters never imagined, extending even into foreign policy, and raised the devolution share.
• Asymmetric accommodation is real and continuing — Article 371 provisions, the Sixth Schedule councils, and the concession of statehood to Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Telangana. A purely centralising account cannot explain why the Union repeatedly gave away powers it was not obliged to give.
• The GST Council’s voting design requires the Union to carry a substantial number of states, and Mohit Minerals (2022) held its recommendations persuasive rather than binding.
• States have successfully resisted central action. The farm laws were repealed, the IAS cadre rules amendment was not notified as proposed, and Article 131 has been used to make the Union defend its conduct in court.

The sharper formulation

• The two positions describe different variables and are not really in conflict. The design is centralised; the operation is set politically; and since 1994 the judiciary has supplied a floor below which centralisation cannot go.
• The most useful observation is about where the pressure has moved. Frictions have migrated from constitutional instruments — dismissal of governments, imposition of President’s Rule — to fiscal and administrative instruments: the composition of the divisible pool, the design of centrally sponsored schemes, the Governor’s discretion, the jurisdiction of central agencies.
• That migration is not evidence of deepening centralisation; it is evidence that the constitutional route was closed. Pressure that can no longer be applied through Article 356 is applied through a scheme’s matching requirement instead, precisely because the first route is judicially policed and the second is not.
• Which means the Bommai floor is holding, and the argument for extending it is straightforward: the spirit of Indian federalism is intact where it is judicially protected and eroded where it depends on convention.
• The November 2025 advisory opinion is the test case, and it went the other way. Justiciability was not extended to assent timelines, leaving one of the most contested frictions to convention alone. The prediction follows: gubernatorial delay will remain a live grievance, because nothing now constrains it except the political cost to the party that benefits from it.
• A corresponding extension on the fiscal side — justiciable limits on the proportion of gross tax revenue routed through cesses and surcharges outside the divisible pool — would do more for the states’ position than any of the amendments the commissions recommended and no government enacted.

Indian federalism is a centralised structure whose actual operation is set politically, with a judicial floor beneath it since 1994.

Conclusion

Wheare’s description has framed the discussion for seventy years, and needs both crediting and superseding.

“a unitary state with subsidiary federal features rather than a federal state with subsidiary unitary features” — K.C. Wheare

• Accurate about the text and wrong about the system. His approach was legal-constitutional and therefore static, and it took the United States as the type against which everything else is measured.
• What a dynamic account adds is the mechanism. The switch between unitary and federal operation has been thrown by the party system, modulated by the development model and, since 1994, restrained by the courts.
• The states were never intended to be the equals of the Union. What the Constitution guarantees them is a sphere in which they govern, a government answerable to their own electorate, and an umpire. The federal question in India is not whether the centre is strong — it was designed to be — but whether that guaranteed sphere is protected when political conditions no longer protect it on their own.
• The record can be stated precisely. Where a judicial rule exists — the floor test, the non-dissolution rule, the maintainability of an Article 131 suit — the sphere has held. Where only convention exists — assent, the Governor’s appointment, consultation before treaty-making, the size of the divisible pool — it has not.
• The instruction about reform follows. The route that worked was not the commission and not the amendment; it was the justiciable rule.