When the United Progressive Alliance was in power from 2004 to 2014, Gujarat's then-chief minister, Narendra Modi, led the States on every subject he believed to be at odds with the Constitution's federal framework. We knew that, if elected to the Indian prime ministership in 2014, he would uphold State sovereignty and eliminate some contentiously obtained Central government powers.
After about a month, it was alarmingly evident that the new prime minister had no intention of decentralising the powers of the Centre. Officers were told to hold onto all the powers that the Indian government already benefited from.
Soon after, well-paid consultants, business lobbyists, advertising companies, and questionable intellectuals on cheap rent took control of the Central government. One of their assignments was to rename every welfare program that was already in place, play alphabet scrabble, and create memorable acronyms that would make for effective advertising taglines. Furthermore, even though states were required to pay for up to 40–50% of these "new" initiatives, nearly all of them had to have the prefix "Prime Minister."
Subsequently, a plethora of concurrent media-focused and bhakt-focused campaigns ensued, asserting that no Prime Minister, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had accomplished anything whatsoever for India over the preceding seventy years.
It is also true that there are significant traces of Central dominance in our Constitution, which was draughted by liberals, concerning a few particular federal relations issues. A strict "centralising" mentality would have been necessary given the horrific unrest that followed India's independence, which saw the British abandon two adversarial countries, fourteen significant provinces, and more than 565 princely states—many of which had separatist goals. Liberals anticipated that as the Indian state grew more developed, many of these laws would be eliminated.
.jpeg)
