NEW DELHI: For the first time since independence a sizeable section of the country’s intelligentsia has started feeling the need for bringing about a lot of federalism in India’s policy to prevent its disintegration Representative of this new thinking are the views expressed recently by Praful Bidwai an enlightened columnist. Writing in the Times of India a conservative Hindu publication Bidwai argues: “If we fail to put radical federalism on the agenda we will only have stoked the fires of separatism jingoism and antidemocratic ethnic chauvinism a sure recipe for India’s disintegration. The choice may not be between a little more federalism or a lot of it but between the latter and disintegration”

The cataclysm in the (former) USSR and Yugoslavia has produced at least two powerful effects in this country. Complacent as assumptions about the permanence of the present order in India irrespective of whether it is reformed for not have been shaken And secondly the question of a arrangement of Center state relations has suddenly invaded public debate. “The idea of a greatly reformed more federal arrangement is no longer taboo. Nor even is the notion of the right of self-determination. It is now impossible not to detect an undercurrent of concern about these issues in discussions in any forum about India’s future This is in itself a healthy development. There are two standard positions around which the discussion is being increasingly polarized. The first holds perhaps out of desperation that a breakup of India is likely or evitable and it seeks to reconcile itself to this by arguing for a loose voluntary federation of scales with a weak center. The second is vigorously opposed to radical federal reform and to autonomy along the lines of Article 370 of the Constitution and regards the status quo including boundaries of the Union as non-negotiable.

“Both positions are open to question. The first view has the merit of taking cognizance of global trends decline of the US and increasing polycentrism; a drive towards more regional autonomy within a supranational integrative process erosion of absolute sovereignty and state hood; and the transition from  Europe des Parties to the Europe of the regions or greatly weakened nations states .It also acknowledges that Kashmir Punjab and (more worrisome) Assam or Orissa and Karnataka are not aberrant or peripheral phenomena attributable Primarily to plots across the border. The second view by contrast is intolerant dogmatic and based (on a priori reasoning. It seeks to put the lid on perfectly healthy urges for decentralization of authority in the name of suppressing secessionism itself always and irredeemably pernicious. And it attaches magic immutable qualities to Indian nationhood.

“A serious flaw in the first view is that it underestimates the integrative tendencies in Indian society and the strength of national institutions while accepting rather too easily that the nation state has already become obsolete as the framework for social organization and development and needs to be replaced by smaller units. Similarly it fails to understand that the disintegration of eastern Europe has less to do with the collapse of the nation state as such than the explosion of national issues created during the formation of what Eric Hobsbawm calls the successor states to the collapsing multiethnic Habsburg Ottoman and Czarist Russian empires and which were artificially suppressed by the imposition by the USSR. However the second view is even more seriously flawed. It not only places nationhood prior to and above democracy. It defines it in cultural or more pretentiously civilizational terms. Thus agrees that unlike the constituents of the former USSR India has always had some kind of a cultural ethnic linguistic and (not to be ignored) religious unity or commonness which furnishes a basis for a unity nation fundamentally indistinguishable from its classical form.

“At one level this notion is a mirror image of the Stalinist view of nationality itself a costly perversity; it is also vulgarly territorial list. At another it is a gross misrepresentation of the historical roots of the Indian nation. These go back not to some ancient primordial cultural phenomenon leave alone “civilization (which has nowhere grown into a modem nation state and has typically fragmented into more homogeneous entities) but to the modem age of capitalism. The Political implications of this view are dangerous and spell forcible assimilation political disenfranchisement of large numbers use of violent means to suppress dissent and minority rights and a paranoid mind set that regards any questioning of central authority and defence of human rights and constitutionality as antinational.

The view is profoundly antidemocratic. It also runs counter to historical trends and can only have the effect of promoting a dark retrograde in ward looking self-obsessed nationalism of the RSS-BIP-VHP (or what is the same thing Jamaat e lslami) variety.

“The case for a federal restructuring of India is powerful Its source is the ideological moral and legal foundation of the Indian nation state viz the freedom movement. It is not adequately appreciated that insofar as that movement was pitted against a tightly centralized unitary colonial state it had necessarily to demand decentralization and loosening of the Centers hold. The story of growth and success of the national movement is also the story of the federal reform of the state and its gradual opening up to the democratic urges of the Indian people. Indeed it is possible to argue that Nehru’s Objectives Resolution of December 1946 in the Constituent Assembly which emphasized a high degree of provincial autonomy could well have. become the basis of independent India’s statute had it not been for the announcement of India’s partition in June 1947 Its reversal took the form of a report of the Union Powers Committee which stressed that a weak center would harm the country’s interests “now that partition is a settled fact.” This tilt towards the unitary as opposed to federal aspect of the Constitution was further strengthened by the communal holocaust and the invasion of Kashmir. It was by no means inevitable or free of contingent or contextual considerations.

“We will perhaps do well to begin with Kashmir and tum a challenge into an opportunity by focusing on Article 370. This means making a historic attempt at conciliation by bringing into being a Constiment Assembly as well as by making an extraordinary generous gesture to the people of the valley so as to reassure them that they have a stake in remaining part of a secular democratic federal India”.

Article extracted from this publication >> January 24, 1992