India’s States: The Struggle to Govern

Abstract

This article analyzes recent variations in governing strategies in different Indian states. Those variations mean that the 'Indian state', as citizens experience it, takes different forms in different states. Between 1989 and mid-2014, no single party could gain a parliamentary majority. That caused a major decentralization of power away from the once dominant Prime Minister's Office-horizontally to other institutions at the national level, and vertically downward to governments at the state level. Ironically, that decentralization of power at the national level was accompanied by a marked centralization of power in the hands of chief ministers within many states. This is connected to a surge in state and central government revenues after 2003, and to India's far from neoliberal economic order which leaves huge discretionary power in politicians' hands. Various devices-legitimate and illicit-which chief ministers use to increase their influence and to survive in power are examined.

The limits of prescription: courts and social policy in India and South Africa

“…It has also been suggested that the Indian court has been strengthened by a political context in which no party was able to form a government on its own between 1989 and 2014. This severely eroded the central government's ability to centralise power and to interfere with the functioning of the country's institutions (Manor 2016). The Court has been able to fill 'a governance vacuum' (Deva 2009: 30) created by a series of weak central governments.…”

The Federalist Compromise

“…Not all of this has happened licitly: States' new regulatory powers under the economic-liberalization regime have allowed chief ministers to collect rents and set up shady funding streams for use in managing the political process. 21 State-level elections were once known as tough for incumbents to win, but this pattern gave way in the 2000s to the phenomenon of the chief minister with a secure grip on office (Modi in Gujarat being a case in point). The shrewdest chief ministers even learned how to leverage the states' role as primary implementers of many policies to steal credit for popular programs whose plans and resources in fact came from New Delhi.…”