India’s federal architecture was designed as a delicate balancing act. The Constitution’s framers, wary of both the chaos of excessive decentralisation and the dangers of over-centralisation witnessed during Partition, chose a model that leans towards the Centre while still granting states meaningful autonomy. For decades, this balance was tested but rarely broken, sustained by single-party dominance at the Centre and a political culture that treated federal disputes as administrative rather than existential. That era is over. India today is governed by a Centre that depends, to varying degrees, on regional allies, while opposition-ruled states grow increasingly assertive about their rights over resources, policy and even law enforcement. The result is a federal fault line running through the country’s politics, one that surfaces every budget season, every Governor’s address, and every dispute over Goods and Services Tax dues.
The friction is visible on multiple fronts. States governed by opposition parties routinely accuse the Centre of using central agencies, discretionary grants and Governors as instruments of political pressure. Delayed release of GST compensation, conditions attached to centrally sponsored schemes, and disputes over the devolution formula recommended by the Finance Commission have all become flashpoints. Southern states, in particular, argue that they are penalised for their success: better performance on population control now translates into a shrinking share of parliamentary seats and central funds relative to their economic contribution. Northern and eastern states, meanwhile, contend that they need greater central support precisely because they lag on development indicators. Both arguments have merit, and reconciling them requires a fiscal federalism framework grounded in fairness rather than political convenience.
The role of Governors deserves particular scrutiny. Conceived as constitutional heads meant to act on the aid and advice of state councils of ministers, Governors in recent years have increasingly found themselves at the centre of political storms — sitting on bills passed by state assemblies for months, commenting publicly on state governance, or being accused of acting as an extension of the ruling party at the Centre. The Supreme Court has repeatedly had to step in, laying down timelines for gubernatorial action on bills and reminding constitutional authorities that discretion is not license. That the judiciary must repeatedly referee what should be routine constitutional functioning is itself a sign of how strained the relationship has become.
Coalition politics at the Centre has, paradoxically, both eased and complicated this picture. A government dependent on regional parties for its parliamentary majority cannot afford to alienate the states those parties represent, which has in the past produced greater accommodation on specific demands — special financial packages, project allocations, or legislative concessions. But this bargaining also risks turning federalism into a transactional exercise, where support is traded for largesse rather than governed by settled constitutional principle. States outside the coalition arithmetic, with no seat at that table, can find themselves further marginalised, deepening the very asymmetry that a mature federal system ought to correct.
None of this is to suggest that Centre-state tension is inherently unhealthy. Federalism is meant to be a site of negotiation, not silent deference. Disagreement over resource sharing, policy design and the limits of central authority is a feature of federal democracies, not a bug. The concern is not that states and the Centre disagree, but that the institutional mechanisms meant to manage that disagreement — the Inter-State Council, the Finance Commission, the GST Council — are underused, treated as afterthoughts rather than the primary forums for resolution. The Inter-State Council, in particular, meets rarely, despite being constitutionally designed for precisely this purpose. Reviving these bodies as genuine deliberative spaces, rather than mechanisms of formal compliance, would do more to ease federal tension than any single policy concession.
India’s diversity has always demanded a federalism that is generous rather than grudging. As coalition arithmetic becomes the norm rather than the exception at the Centre, the temptation to treat federal relations as a zero-sum contest for resources and control will only grow. Resisting that temptation, and instead building durable institutional habits of consultation, is the more difficult but far more necessary path. A republic as vast and varied as India cannot be governed well from the Centre alone, nor can its states thrive in isolation from it. The health of that relationship, more than any single election outcome, will determine how well India is governed in the years ahead.
— DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)