The Union must not devour its States

SINGAPORE’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once observed, with characteristic bluntness, that India is not a nation but a set of countries held together by a British railway line. The remark stung when it was made. It still stings because it contains enough truth to be uncomfortable.

The framers of our Constitution understood this instinctively. They did not pretend that India was a natural nation-state in the European mould. Article 1 declares simply: India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States. Not a Union with States. Not a Union above States. A Union of States. The distinction is not grammatical. It is constitutional.

That distinction is now under sustained assault. The Justice Kurian Joseph Committee, which was constituted by the Tamil Nadu government in April 2025 and submitted Part I of its report last month, has produced the most comprehensive accounting yet of how far Indian constitutional practice has drifted from this founding design.

The committee’s findings on the Governor’s office have been borne out by the latest gubernatorial appointments and resignations. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee tweeted that she was not even consulted about the transfer of RN Ravi to her state. Ravi, who has had a combative relationship with Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin, has been transferred in time for an

unusually fraught election in West Bengal. Some have even speculated that Ravi might be an instrument of recommending President’s rule in Bengal.

The Governor’s office was conceived as a neutral constitutional link. It has become a partisan instrument. Bills passed by elected legislatures are held back for months or years. Raj Bhavans have been turned into outposts of the ruling party at the Centre. The Supreme Court found occasion to rebuke this conduct of RN Ravi in State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu in 2025. The committee’s remedy is straightforward: Governors must act on state Bills within 15 days with deemed assent on expiry, and Article 155 should be amended to require appointment from names approved by the state legislature. These are the minimum conditions for treating state legislatures as legitimate constitutional institutions.

The Tamil Nadu government, under MK Stalin, deserves commendation for commissioning this inquiry. In an era when States are expected to remain quietly grateful for whatever autonomy the Centre permits, this act of constitutional assertion is itself a form of public service. The committee’s central finding will surprise no one who has watched Indian federalism at close quarters. Centralisation, once a founding necessity born of Partition anxieties and the integration of over 560 princely states, has hardened into an inherited reflex, a habit mistaken for principle.

The erosion has not come through any single dramatic stroke. It has crept in through successive constitutional amendments, expansive Union legislation in Concurrent List subjects, conditional Finance Commission transfers and Centrally sponsored schemes that convert States from governments into implementing agencies of Union policy. The cumulative pattern is an interconnected web of federal erosion. Even K Santhanam, a member of the Constituent Assembly, had cautioned that the Union’s strength lay not in the indiscriminate accumulation of functions, but in the disciplined refusal of responsibilities that did not properly belong at the national level. We have forgotten the caution and retained only the accumulation.

There is a persistent illusion, which CM Stalin has articulated forcefully, that the Union becomes stronger by diminishing its States. It is wrong. The Union and the States are not competitors in a zero-sum contest. No authority sitting in New Delhi, however enlightened, can tailor policy with equal sensitivity to every linguistic region, agricultural ecology or labour market.

Tamil Nadu’s noon meal scheme, Kerala’s achievements in public healthcare, Maharashtra’s employment guarantee initiative — all began as state experiments before informing national policy. Overcentralisation suppresses the very diversity of strategies from which innovation and discovery arise.

History teaches a harder lesson too, one that those in Delhi would do well to hear. Overcentralisation does not produce passive acceptance. It produces reaction. Punjab’s tragedy in the 1980s did not emerge from nowhere. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 was at its core a constitutional demand: for the redefining of Centre-State relations, for genuine devolution of powers and for recognition that Punjab’s identity and political aspirations deserved constitutional respect. Those demands were not secessionist in origin. They were federal. The failure to engage with them constitutionally, the preference for dismissal over dialogue, contributed to a decade of violence that cost thousands of lives.

The lesson is not complicated. When legitimate constitutional grievances are denied constitutional remedies, they seek other outlets. A Union that mistakes suppression for unity should not be surprised when States seek more than they were denied.

One recommendation deserves particular attention because it addresses a wound that has not healed. The Justice Kurian Joseph committee proposes that no territorial reorganisation Bill may be introduced in Parliament when the affected state is under President’s rule. This speaks directly to what was done to Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019. A constituent state was bifurcated into two Union Territories by parliamentary majority, with its legislature suspended and its leadership under detention. The constitutional provision notionally requiring the state legislature’s view was rendered meaningless through the fiction of Presidential rule. The Centre, having imposed President’s rule, then consulted itself.

If a state can be extinguished when its legislature is conveniently suspended, the indestructibility of States is not a constitutional guarantee but a constitutional pretence. The committee’s proposed remedy, that all territorial reorganisation require the affected state’s genuine concurrence, would restore what the framers intended when they wrote that India shall be a Union of States.

On language, the committee exposes a statistical manipulation that has underwritten decades of cultural imposition. By misclassifying 53 independent languages, including Bhojpuri, Rajasthani and Chhattisgarhi, as dialects of Hindi, the Census has artificially inflated Hindi speakers’ base from around 25 per cent to a claimed 43.6 per cent. Nearly 250 Indian languages have become extinct in the past 50 years. Another 400 face extinction in the next 50.

The committee recommends constitutionally entrenching English as a permanent official language and recognising all Eighth Schedule languages as official languages of the Union. Federations flourish when linguistic diversity is protected. They fracture when one language is imposed.

On the GST, States surrendered their most productive taxing powers in exchange for promises of revenue growth and stability that remain largely unredeemed. The GST Council, where the Union holds a structural veto, has functioned as an extension of the Union Finance Ministry. The committee’s proposals include requiring Union decisions to secure the concurrence of at least 20 States, rotating the chairpersonship among state finance ministers and establishing an independent Secretariat and a statutory Dispute Settlement Authority. These are the minimum conditions for a body that was sold to the States as cooperative federalism.

The objective, as CM Stalin has argued, is not to weaken the Union but to right-size it. A Union is strong because it is focused, and States are strong because they are trusted. The Rajamannar Committee said much of this in 1969. The Sarkaria Commission stated it in 1988. The Punchhi Commission said it in 2010. All were received respectfully and implemented rarely.

Lee Kuan Yew’s jibe about the railway line was meant to wound. But a railway line, at its best, connects what would otherwise remain separate. The question before this Republic is whether it will be a line that binds willing partners in a common journey, or a track laid down by one party for the convenience of the locomotive at its head.

Tamil Nadu has done its constitutional duty. The Republic must now do its own.