Several Chief Ministers, especially those from the non-NDA parties who attended the governing council meeting of the Niti Aayog where Mr Modi referred to Team India, have expressed their grave concerns about the discriminatory way the Union government treats them
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's exhortation that the states and the Union government must work together as Team India to achieve national goals, and his suggestion that the state governments led by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) implement the good governance practices of each other, are a sure recipe for the dream that India becomes a developed country by 2047 when it marks 100 years of its independence. Now that he has made the prescription for it, people will expect him to follow up and help the states and the Union government to implement it. It would perhaps call for a new tangent for the Union government to take if the Prime Minister’s dream were to be realised.
Several Chief Ministers, especially those from the non-NDA parties who attended the governing council meeting of the Niti Aayog where Mr Modi referred to Team India, have expressed their grave concerns about the discriminatory way the Union government treats them. Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin promised to take the state's economy to $15 billion when the country's economy will touch $30 trillion in 2047 but pointed out that the share of taxes in the divisible pool had come down periodically and wanted it to be raised to 50 per cent. He also pointed out that the Union government was extracting a heavy price from the state for not implementing the National Education Policy (NEP). Punjab chief minister Punjab Bhagwant Mann complained about what he called the “step-motherly” treatment of his state by the Union government. The Kerala government’s appeal seeking the apex court’s intervention against what it said was the denial of its rightful share of economic aid from the Union government is under the court’s consideration; other states have also pointed at the discriminatory practices by the Union government in sanctioning Central aid to states. That GST regime that has strengthened the Union government and weakened the states has become handy for the former to exercise undemocratic control over the country’s purse strings, something the Modi government has been using to the hilt.
It may be recalled that several state governments had approached the Supreme Court and secured favourable judgments against the crippling intervention of governors in their functioning. The Supreme Court had in a recent historic judgment underlined the right of the state legislatures to legislate and ordered that the governors, the Union government which controls them, and the President, have no right to exercise a pocket veto on the laws state legislatures pass. There have been instances of the Union governments misusing the office of the governor and putting a spoke in the state governments’ wheel, including their dismissal, but the situation has worsened under the NDA government.
Mr Modi has served as chief minister before moving to the national capital as Prime Minister and hence understands the constraints under which states function. He also understands how to strengthen the states economically and administratively. It is time the Prime Minister walks the talk, resolves the complaints of the states with respect to the allocation of resources and intervention in the running of their governments though unconstitutional and undemocratic means, and holds all of them together in the country's march towards the developed status by 2047.
