Flexible federalism

The idea of centre-state relations as part of the architecture of federalism reflects a mode of thought we take for granted. It is premised on the legitimacy of the nation state and the nature of democracy.

Both make two assumptions of synergy: that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and the whole is only as good as the vitality of the parts. But the model of the system adopted is antiquated, a 19^th century treatise for a 21^st century dream. The categories used, the key words employed—security, sovereignty, decentralisation, efficiency, productivity—belong to an outdated format. We are contributing to the making of an obsolescent federalism.

Federalism as a mode of thought spatialises a territory, assumes homogeneity of space, and creates a set of divisions or classifications about how to divide power. The division between centre and state is the standard dualistic cut. At times it becomes a triptych when the third tier, the panchayat system, is added.

Dualism and hierarchy become the basic modes of thought representative of a tree or a taproot, through which power is then distributed. This constitutes the standard narrative of federalism, which sees power as stock rather than flow, and assumes the territorial materiality of the border. Problem-solving is represented in a rudimentary spatial form.

What I am proposing instead is a “federation of time.” I will discuss three forms of time: 1) the time of emergency; 2) the future as time; 3) the multiplicity of time that a federal model has to contend with.

The emergency, a constitutional response to a state of perceived or real crisis, of internal threat or external force, usually creates a centralisation of power or a suspension of fundamental rights. The emergency as an episodic process triggers a modification of the Constitution as an adaptive process. But emergency in a constitutional sense has no thermostat, or a feedback loop where the system returns to normal and rights are restored. The Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that while the emergency is an episode, its responses acquire a more permanent quality. The state of exception becomes the rule. The crisis is normalised in a juridical sense.

In India too, states of exception are becoming the norm: either as national purpose, a popular word for national development projects, or through tropes like security or crisis. The legal apparatus for meeting a perceived crisis remains in place long after the episodic purpose it was designed to handle ceases to exist.

If time as crises is one problem for Indian federalism, time as future has no place in constitutionality. Every Constitution has to adapt to the nature of speed, to innovations in technology, to ideas of risk centring on uncertainties of scientific change, which are neither local or global, nor centre or state. They demand ideas of governance and complexity which our Constitution does not acknowledge.

Probably the only area of futuristic impulse is the Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP), where the future as federalism and the future of federalism need to be articulated. The current provisions under the directive principles have their roots in ideologies. They are formulated as wish lists, fragments of various isms: in particular items out of communist, socialist, and Gandhian manifestos. Out of it emerges a collage of propositions that articulate some notion of social and economic justice.

Isms, even if utopian, are poor forecasters of the future. What one requires are scenarios of a different kind. The DPSP can help create a tacit and a projected Constitution. A tacit Constitution is based on the assumption that each such document is embedded in an unconscious of ideas about ecology, technology, and time. A projected Constitution states ideas of a preferred form of wellbeing; for example, ideas of technology or governance.

The DPSP can articulate this methodology of scenarios. For example:

(a) It can include the responsibility for lowering India’s carbon footprint at each level;

(b) The directive principles can state arguments for prudential models of governance of, for example, bio-technology;

(c) The DPSP can demand that socio-ecological audits of all special economic zones and development projects must be published under the Right to Information Act. The list can become a part of a Knowledge Commission/Civil Society project;

(d) It can invoke the “100 miles” principle. This idea is swadeshi-ism at its best; it was suggested by the activist Ela Bhatt, who said that people must have control of the food they grow, the water they drink, and be responsible for the ecology of a place within a 100-mile radius. Without this, Panchayati Raj by itself can be vacuous. The 100 miles is a way of converting space to place and owning it as a responsibility. It links life, livelihood, and lifestyle both as autonomy and as carbon footprint.

The DPSP can also formulate indices of diversity showing that a polyarchic model of decision-making (where power is vested in multiple people) has to be panarchic (encompassing all others) in its solutions.

However, panarchy and decentralisation are two different approaches to problem-solving. The emphasis on decentralisation is on dispersal of power, on locality and participation. As a method, a technique, a tactic panarchy is more strategic in the way it thinks about scale. Federalism is more familiar with size rather than scale. In scale, the solution at each level can possibly be different, even qualitative. Panchayat, state, and centre have to work panarchically in the future. Panarchic solutions increase diversity indices. They are ecologically more resilient than hierarchic solutions.

The third aspect of a “federalism of time” is that federalism feeds off territoriality and thus does not cope with multiplicities of time. It accepts the paradigm of the state and therefore only builds epicycles of modifications around it. Even the panchayat, for all its allure, does not challenge the heliocentrism of the State. The contouring of state and centre is fairly rudimentary.

If worked into a multiplicity of times, the notions of federalism become more complex. The margins as visualised here are spatially remote, fragments of periphery. It reverses the linearity of centre visiting states or periphery to enact the standard consultative process, which we pompously call participation.

So, for example, we can unite Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Manipur to construct their vision of a democratic federal model as seen from the margins. Rather than reading this as a reverse telescope model, such a construction must be seen as critical for federalism. For the centre to hold it must assume the possibility of secession and build such fluctuations into the model. Otherwise any struggle either in Manipur or Ramgarh is read as rebellion, secession or revolution, which allegedly justifyies action against our own people.

Unless we build models of disorder, the system will not be diversity-sensitive. The margins are not underdeveloped fragments, they may constitute alternative imaginations the future needs.

The homogenisable models of time as progress or development then give way to a multiple ecology of time. The questions then change. For example: How do centre-state relations work between oral, written, and digital societies? What new rhizomes of power connect peasant, craft, nomadic, industrial, and post-industrial societies?

The official classification that anchors federalism seeks difference within homogeneity and ignores the other splits, the taxonomic fissures between the formal and informal parts of society. The federalism of the formal and the federalism of the informal economies form different kinds of wholes. Political battles emerge between the centralism of the formal and the diffusiveness of the informal community. The emergency as a case study in the pathology of federalism exemplified this problem.

What I am suggesting is that without federating multiple times, federations of space are limp. By creating con-federations of time, India can work the future by reworking the standard juxtaposition of past, present and future.

I think we are losing out on new imagination for the future. Federalism has to allow for a different sense of fragments and wholes.

Shiv Visvanathan is professor at the School of Government and Public Policy at the O. P. Jindal Global University, Haryana.

This article was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations as part of a special compilation of essays titled Federalising India. You can read more exclusive content here.

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