In India’s federal discourse, as quite famously captured in the landmark S.R. Bommai judgement (1994), the federal units, i.e. the States are considered as a “creature of the Constitution”, precluding their right to secede or claim sovereignty; therefore, despite the plenary executive and legislative authority enjoined upon the states in allocated jurisdictions (per Articles 245, 162, and the Seventh Schedule), their territorial integrity is not considered sacrosanct by the Constitution (per Article 3). The doctrine that sprang from the constitutional architect Dr. B.R. Ambedkar that “India is an indestructible Union of destructible units” (Raja Ram Pal vs Hon’ble Speaker, Lok Sabha, 2007) highlights the unionising philosophical bent of the Indian Union. But then, the constitutional assumption of the formation of the Union itself doesn’t necessarily factor in differential historical trajectories of its different units–in fact, Manipur’s case is quite an aberration in terms of how it came into being within the Union (then Dominion) in 1949 considering its progressive constitutional moment in 1947, and also its long history of being a distinct nation-state with treaty relations with major international entities since 1762. Manpur’s historical-political identity’s causative and formative lineage was attuned more to the dynamics of what is now geographically located as Southeast Asia, marked by a late agentic absorption of parts of Indic civilisational tropes (again, very much a Southeast Asian commonality where ‘civilisational’ adoptions cannot be conflated with postcolonially-understood ‘political’ allegiance).
The homogenising and de facto unionising Indian constitutional assumptions continue to provoke critical discourses around contradictions of State identity and Union interests. Ajay Kumar Singh (2015) in his essay ‘Constitutional semantics and autonomy within Indian federalism’ points out the contradiction between Article 1 and Article 3, where the former defines India as a Union made of States (conceding that there are certain units that had “actually” come together to form the very Union), while the latter then completely contradicts the former by its repudiation of the territorial sanctity and organic identity of the States (which the author argues “dispossess people, regions and states from their fundamental constitutive rights”; the constitutive rights being rights to culture, territory or region, resources and self-governance).
The underlying, “preferred” assumption is of the constitution being the ultimate creator of the States, rather than the States ceding their respective sovereignties to form the Union. In Dr. Pradeep Jain Etc. vs Union of India and Ors (1984) case, the court held that “India is not a compact of sovereign states which have come together to form a federation by ceding a part of their sovereignty to the federal state” (fashioning itself as a ‘holding together’ federation as opposed to the ‘coming together’ federation model of the USA). The Berubari Union and the Exchange of Enclaves (1960) judgement too gave similar reasoning, and argued that “[t]he constituent units of the federation were deliberately created and […] unlike the units of other federations, had no organic roots in the past.” This, as I would like to call it, is ‘clean-slate constitutional nation-making’, which treats the moment of constitutional manifestation as the be-all and end-all of the formation of the post-colonial Indian nation-state, and marks a point of contention (a mismatch between ‘state-nation’ reality and ‘nation-state’ aspiration). It presents a case of historical anachronism, where differential histories are not taken into account, perhaps due to the Republic’s insecurity of its own pre-Republic past(s).
Tripurdaman Singh argues in his essay ‘The Authoritarian Roots of India’s Democracy’ that “a certain authoritarianism is embedded in India’s political and constitutional structure.” He further cites political theorist Uday S. Mehta who terms Hobbes “the largely unacknowledged mentor of Indian constitutionalism.” In a similar tangent, V.S. Naipaul explains how the traumatic history of waves of foreign invasions and conquests anchors the Indian political and cultural subconscious in the frame of a ‘wounded civilisation’.
A basic survey of the Indian Constitution reveals highly centralising provisions, such as the Union List’s Entry 92A (taxes on sale or purchase of goods in the course of interstate trade or commerce) and Entry 92B (taxes on the consignment of goods in inter-state trade or commerce), which are vested in the Union. Even though States have ownership and authority over minerals along with licence granting rights, their tax collection on mineral rights is subject to parliamentary limitations in the interests of “mineral development”. State jurisdiction over entries/subjects such as police, communications, water, mines and minerals, etc. are subject to the overriding legislative and executive control of the Union government and the Union List, with the ‘residuary powers’ (per Article 248) vested in the Union government. Articles 256 and 257 empower the Union government to issue binding ‘directives/directions’ (executive fiats) to the States for compliance in certain domains (such as “the construction and maintenance of means of communication declared in the direction to be of national or military importance”) and also to ensure compliance with the laws made by the Parliament.
Article 365 titled ‘Effect of failure to comply with, or to give effect to, directions given by the Union’–although subject to judicial review–also gives immense power to the Union whereby the President can declare that “a situation has arisen in which the Government of the State cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution.” Article 249 empowers the Rajya Sabha (Council of States) to pass a resolution supported by not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting, enabling the Parliament to make laws which are ordinarily under State list in “national interest”. This would have a validity of a year and is extendable further. What makes the provision exceptional is that this is for non-Emergency situations. Another issue is that the term ‘national interest’ is not codified as to give a precise definition and scope. With the BJP regime’s increasingly onward push towards centralisation, the federal strains are becoming palpable. The reduction of fiscal authority of the States with the inception of Goods and Services Tax (GST) is one glaring instance. Pre-GST, the Union taxed the production of goods and services, while the States taxed their sale. Post-GST, States have lost their exclusive power to tax the sale and purchase of goods.
Strains of discursive federal pushbacks
In this context of increasing federal tensions, the Tamil Nadu government led by its then Chief Minister M.K. Stalin instituted a three-member High-Level Committee on Union-State relations chaired by Justice Kurian Joseph in 2025. The Committee submitted the first part of its report early 2026. It called for major structural changes for a better federal scheme of things by taking on issues such as the need for codification of the ‘Basic Structure Doctrine’ (the Indian Constitution is incomplete without this); role of the Governor; territorial integrity of States (in reference to the Damocles’ sword of Article 3; the Committee recommends that there should be no territorial reorganisation when a State is under President’s Rule, among other related recommendations); GST reforms (fiscal autonomy of states); Hindi imposition; Education and Health autonomy; Delimitation (the Committee recommends extending the inter-State seat allocation freeze based on the 1971 Census until 2126 or until Total Fertility Rates converge within a narrow band (e.g., ±10 per cent) of the national average, whichever is earlier. The rationale being to avoid penalising States that achieved population stabilisation. It also proposes separate Union and State Delimitation Commissions), etc. In the times to come, the need for federal discourse in India will become increasingly acute considering the changing political winds in what Milan Vaishanv terms as India’s “Second Republic” (a shift from the “First Republic” marked by the constitutional moment of 1950 to a majoritarian, civilisational one). The pending federal discourse will be all the more relevant for the states in Northeast India, where dynamics within certain communities have raised substantive historical-political questions.
As I have briefly broached in an earlier essay of mine titled ‘The Indian Constitutional Imagination: Need for a More Accommodative Political Space’, the Indian constitutional discourse needs to broaden its base of maturity. It needs to stave off its insecure bits as reflected in its occasional constitutional sleights of hand, and also its clean-slatist constitutional primacy/supremacy and the constitutional-derivative nation-state origination theory. The ‘people’ comprised in Indian ‘political sovereignty’ (political sovereignty being always superior to legal sovereignty) needs to bring into conversation the many ‘peoples’ within and their differential histories.
A brief detour into Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) concept: lessons to glean
A chronic issue that bothers everyone in Manipur, a Special Category State, is how the state is not able to generate its own revenues; the central-grants dependency of the state is such that central transfers comprise more than 90% of its total revenue receipts. The causal issues are multidimensionally entangled–ranging from the armed conflict situation, which has possibly evoked a directed countermeasure of a corruptive culture of political-economic impunity with unaccountable funds pilferage; the tertiarisation of the state economy that never developed its productive capacity and so on. The crux of the issue remains, however, ensuring human dignity down to the last person in this state beyond community lines; but how is this to be ensured? The international customary law-sanctioned ‘right to self-determination’ (not amounting to or encouraging secession, as clearly laid down in Article 46(1) of UNDRIP, 2007) which gives a ‘people’ the right to freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development, including the right to determine the manner of usage of their lands and resources, is a reasonable lens to think with.
Norway, with a population that is only almost two times that of Manipur, is today what a proper, well-“oiled” welfare state should be like, all thanks to its Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) called the Government Pension Fund Global (also, the ‘Oil Fund’), the largest such fund globally. This Nordic model of a ‘Social Democratic’ welfare state provides to its citizens practically free universal healthcare, free public education which covers higher education too, and extensive income and social security.
Nagy Szabolcs writes in his article ‘Why Every Country Should Have a Sovereign Wealth Fund’ that “a sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned investment vehicle that parks surplus government revenue in diversified assets, typically international equities, bonds, and real estate. The fund generates returns over time, and governments draw on those returns (not the principal) to finance public spending. The model works for any country with revenue surpluses from a volatile or finite source.” In Norway’s case, the government deposits petroleum revenue into the fund each year, which is exclusively invested abroad (to avoid the incapacitation of the domestic economy by what is known as the ‘Dutch disease’ phenomenon) and limits annual withdrawals to approximately 3% of the fund’s value (this fiscal rule prevents politicians from depleting the fund for short-term projects). Norway lives off investment returns, not the underlying resource. Nagy further writes that the fund’s value at the end of 2025 was roughly NOK 21,300 billion, more than twice the Norwegian GDP. The fund owns stakes in over 7200 companies across 68 countries, with its annual returns averaging 6.64% since 1998. The investments are distributed across global public equities (maximum investment done here), bonds (or, fixed-income securities), real estate and renewable energy infrastructure with very strict ethical guidelines guiding these investments.
Norway’s welfare model can be an illustrative guide, among many other possibilities, in terms of an advanced federal discourse and a reasonable give and take exercise involving concerned stakeholders to ensure a meaningful, secure and dignified life to besieged peoples. Substantive and honest constitutional, ethical, historical and political conversations are called for.
