Devolution in India

The adoption of federalism as the guiding principle of national consolidation was accompanied almost throughout the first few post-independence decades by the importance accorded to linguistic ethno-nationalism in the demarcation of the constituent spatial units of the federation. The Indian Constitution of 1950 accorded the status of ‘National Languages’ to Hindi and English but made provision for the use of fifteen other ‘Indian Languages’ in regional administrative affairs (this number has since then been increased to 22).
Twenty-nine ‘States’ and six ‘Union Territories’ constitute the present (2006) sub-national spatial network of devolution in India. All States and the Union Territory of Pondicheri (former French colony comprising four non-continuous localities) have their own elected legislatures (mostly, unicameral), in addition to being represented in both houses of the federal parliament. Five of the Union Territories – Chandigarh (city), Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu (two groups of non-contiguous enclaves), Lakshadweep and Andaman & Nicobar (archipelagos) – send elected representatives to ‘Lok Sabha’, are administered directly by the central government, have no elected legislatures of their own, but have their local government institutions.

There is variation among the States of the Indian federation in respect of the devolved powers they exercise. The most important and controversial among such variations is the substantially higher level of autonomy accorded to the State of Jammu & Kashmir through Article 370 of the Constitution, amendments to its original form (introduced in response to opposition from certain other States to the exceptional treatment) notwithstanding.

The Indian Constitution provides for a strong Central Government, with the Centre having exclusive powers over 99 specifically listed functions of government, in addition to the powers it shares with the States in respect of 52 functions – those specified in a “concurrent list”. At least in theory the State governments have a monopoly over 61 functions specified in the “State List”. All residual powers (those not listed) are also vested in the Centre. As several critics have pointed out, in Centre-State disputes concerning the actual exercise of these powers it is usually the will of the Centre that has prevailed (subject, however, to the enhancing or curtailing impact of tug-of-wars of electoral politics). The Centre’s exclusive powers include those pertaining to the creation of new States and Union Territories. More significantly, in situations of serious confrontation, the central government of India derives overwhelming powers over the States from the so-called “emergency provisions” of the Constitution (Articles 253 to 260) which enable it to suspend over any part of the country the normal procedures of law enforcement, to dissolve State governments, and to establish ‘Presidential Rule’ over any State. According to the review of India’s federal system by the Sarkaria Commission of 1983, since the promulgation of the Constitution, “emergency regulations” had been invoked on more than one-hundred occasions, almost entirely at the discretion of the Prime Minister.

In the formative stages of the Indian nation-state – i.e. the final phase of decolonisation in South Asia – British control over the areas that came to constitute the Republic of India was not uniform. The ‘Provinces’ under direct British rule accounted for no more than about 49% of India at independence. A large part of the remaining territory consisted of more than six-hundred ‘Princely States’ over most of which British rule had been nominal, and several coastal colonies of the Portuguese and the French. There were, in addition, the extensive Himalayan tribal tracts that had been designated ‘Excluded’ or ‘Partially Excluded’ (from Delhi’s direct control) under the constitutional dispensation of the Simon Commission of 1935. Their outer peripheries remained ill-defined, and, in that sense, they constituted a ‘buffer zone” between the British Indian Empire and the interior of continental Asia.

The task of national consolidation that confronted the leaders of emergent India thus involved the resolution of territorial disputes with neighbour countries and the stabilisation of international frontiers, the strengthening of national security, the absorption into the national polity of many pre-modern enclaves the rulers of which had exercised varying degrees of autonomy in earlier times, the appeasement or suppression of incipient secessionist movements in certain peripheral areas (notably in Nagaland, Kashmir and Hyderabad) and, above all, facilitating due representation in the affairs of government of the diverse groups of people with distinctive identities in respect of language, religion, caste and tribe that constituted the Indian nation. The federal system adopted in 1950 after more than two years of intense deliberation was expected to facilitate this task.

The adoption of federalism as the guiding principle of national consolidation was accompanied almost throughout the first few post-independence decades by the importance accorded to linguistic ethno-nationalism in the demarcation of the constituent spatial units of the federation. The Indian Constitution of 1950 accorded the status of ‘National Languages’ to Hindi and English but made provision for the use of fifteen other ‘Indian Languages’ in regional administrative affairs (this number has since then been increased to 22). In addition, constitutional guarantees ensured for all children primary education in their mother-tongue. Hindi being the first language for only 42% of the Indian population, the constitution facilitated the promotion of literacy in that language in all areas of the country with the objective of making it, by the mid-1960s, the sole ‘National Language’ of India. The notion that a single indigenous language of government will best serve the interests of national consolidation was much in vogue in India in those less enlightened times as it was in several ex-colonial Asian nation states in their early existence – Urdu in Paskistan, Nepali in Nepal, Sinhala in Sri Lanka, and (those that got away with it) Bangladesh with Bangla, and Malaysia and Indonesia with their own ‘bhasha’ in the roman script.

A process of ‘State Reorganisation’, initially aimed at eliminating the waywardness of the existing demarcation of administrative units at the second tier of government, and later, specifically focused on providing each of the numerically large language groups at least one sub-national unit of government (‘state’ or ‘union territory’) in which it would constitute the majority began to be pursued in the early 1950s. Andhra Pradesh, the earliest product of this principle, brought together within a single State the areas carved out of former Madras Province, Hyderabad and Mysore, so that Telugu-speakers would constitute its majority. This was soon followed by the partition of the former province of Bombay into Maharashtra and Gujarat – a Marathi-majority State and a Gujarati-majority State. Parts of the Malabar coast from the former Madras Province were annexed to the districts in Travancore-Cochin to constitute the Malayalam-speaking State of Kerala. The State of Karnataka was created by merging the Kannada-speaking areas of southern Deccan. Madhya Pradesh, a State in which Hindi speakers would constitute a slender majority, was created out of a linguistically heterogeneous area of which the former ‘Central Provinces’ and ‘Madhya Bharat’ constituted the core. Meanwhile the committee entrusted the task of ‘State Reorganisation’ ignored demands that did not appear to command vehement popular support, sometimes in disregard of the numerical size of the population on whose behalf the demands were being made (as in the case of the Maithili of Bihar). It also remained wary of granting statehood to linguistic regions that correspond spatially to large agglomerations of people with other ethnic identities such as those of religion or tribe – the delay, despite intense agitation, in forming the State of Nagaland until 1962, and of Punjab until 1966, and the rejection of the demand for a State of ‘Udayachal’ by Bodo tribes of northern Assam and for a State of ‘Gorkhaland’ by the Nepali-speaking Gurkhas of the Darjeeling area of West Bengal were due largely to this cautiousness. Creating the Sikh-majority and predominantly Punjabi-speaking State of Punjab also meant the carving out of a new, predominantly Hindi-speaking State of Haryana. Meanwhile, the ‘North-East’ (original State of Assam, the North-East Frontier Province, and former monarchies such as Manipur, Tripura and Sikkim) was converted in a series of slow and cautious steps into a network of States – Nagaland (in 1963), Meghalaya (1971), Manipur (1972), Tripura (1972), Sikkim (1975), Arunachal Pradesh (1986) and Mizoram (1987). In most of these, language did not figure prominently in state demarcation. Thereafter, following a long spell over which the federal government remained unresponsive to various other demands for autonomy, three new States – Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh (both in north-eastern Deccan) and Uttaranchal (in the Himalayan foothills of the north) were created in 2000, and the Union Territory of Delhi City was elevated to statehood in 2004, once again, largely in response to non-linguistic necessities and demands.

Thus, over more than half a century since its initiation, ‘State Reorganisation’ resulted in (a) converting the former system of placing the constituent units of the Indian Union in several categories (each with different relations with the centre) into a largely dichotomous typology of ‘States’ and ‘Union Territories’; (b) increasing the number of fully fledged states from 10 (those placed in the list of ‘Part A States’ of the First Schedule of the Constitution in 1950), to 29 at present, and (c) bringing about a far greater correspondence between the distribution of groups with linguistic and certain other prominently articulated ethnic identities and the spatial structure of the Indian federation than there was at the promulgation of the Constitution.

To be continued….

The writer is Professor Emeritus, University of Peradeniya .If you have any comments on this serious of article please send editorazad@gmail.com. We are ready publishing your comments on this site too.

Link for Part 01