Our states are not the Centre’s supplicants

Election time offers opportunities for partisan sniping. It does not matter whether it is unfair or inaccurate, or even plain wrong. Parties and politicians have to stoop to conquer. It is not surprising then that even prime minister Manmohan Singh, despite his sober veneer, chose to hit out at the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government for inefficient use of Rs1,000-crore of Central assistance. Nitish Kumar hit back by reminding the prime minister-economist that the package was part of the compensation for Bihar when mineral-rich Jharkhand was carved out as a separate state. The money was given to central agencies for executing projects like building roads.

Other insinuations and innuendoes are flying on all sides. Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi have harped on the old theme of how the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is providing funds for Bihar’s development. BJP’s senior leader Arun Jaitley shot back saying that Central funds come from taxes collected from the people of the state and the Central government had no proprietorial right over them.

Congress leaders have always been imperious about the good they do for the country when holding the reins of power at the Centre, especially when non-Congress parties are in office in the states. There is a basic flaw in the Centre-state relationship in India’s ostensibly federal system — constitutional experts choose to describe it as quasi-federal — which leans towards the Centre rather than the states. This is obvious from the sharing of national taxes, though a complicated system has been put in place and improvised on by successive finance commissions. The move to have a goods and services tax (GST) from 2012 is another attempt to rationalise Central and state taxes and the sharing of revenues between the two.

There are two other points of contention. One is when states seek Central assistance to deal with natural calamities like drought and flood, it gives the Central government and the party in power the option of playing benefactor when, in reality, it is little more than a constitutional mechanism. The other point has to do with foodgrain procurement and storage. The state governments are supposed to draw whatever is due to them from the centrally-managed storage system. Again, it is made to appear that the Central government is doling it out to supplicant states. This distorts the federal balance. A dispassionate debate on the functioning federalism is much needed now.