Modi’s party does not control all of India. But He is working on it.
It is the final frontier for India’s most powerful leader in decades.
Narendra Modi has made it his mission during his decade as prime minister to turn a complex and diverse country of 1.4 billion people into a monolith dominated by his sweeping Hindu nationalist vision.
The news media, the national legislature, civil society, and sometimes even the courts – all are bent to his will. But one critical group of holdouts remains: some of India’s richest states, the engines of its rapid growth.
The future shape of the world’s largest democracy – and its economic trajectory – could rest on the power struggles that have emerged from it.
Mr Modi, who is well placed to win a third term in national elections due to start on April 19, is using an increasingly heavy hand in what his opponents call a dishonest attempt to oust the governments of the states where his party fails. check.
They accuse Modi’s government of delaying federal funding for major projects; of jailing or pursuing opposition leaders and protecting anyone who joins the prime minister’s party; of hindering the delivery of basic services; and of throwing state politics into chaos.
The tensions are tearing apart India’s delicate federal formula of power-sharing and political competition, the glue that holds the country together across 28 states and eight territories.
Regional leaders have described the behavior of the central government, which has more power than in federal systems like the United States, as that of a colonial overlord. In the south, the most developed and innovative part of India, officials have spoken of a “separate nation” for their region if “patterns of injustice” continue.
Mr. Modi and his lieutenants, in turn, have accused state leaders of harboring a “separatist mindset” and pursuing policies that could “break the nation.”
India’s move toward more centralized governance could hurt overall growth, analysts say, as such efforts have done in the past. Major national spending programs focus on fundamental development problems that the South largely solved decades ago. If that region’s freedom to make investments based on its own needs is restricted, the consequences could be far-reaching.
“It is ultimately self-defeating,” said PT Rajan, minister in the government of the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Mr. Modi offers a simple solution: that states ruled by parties other than his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, come on board.
He often uses car terminology for his pitch. Those states, he says, could benefit from what he calls a “dual-engine” government, with one party – his own – working in sync at both the national and state levels.
If they don’t comply, states will throw one wrench after another into their governments’ work, officials say, making it difficult for them to deliver on election promises. The BJP, which is ruthlessly expanding its base, is waiting in the wings.
Last month, the chief ministers of about six states staged a dramatic demonstration near the seat of federal power in New Delhi.
As posters reading “Our blood, our sweat, our taxes” hung behind them, they complained that Mr. Modi was using his outsized control over the distribution of revenues across India to entrench his party and hobble their own state governments .
At the same time, Mr. Modi was on a final tour of the country before announcing the election dates. In opposition states, he combined promises of billions of dollars in infrastructure and welfare projects with scathing criticism of local parties.
They are also destructive to him. They have repeatedly taken New Delhi-appointed governors, who serve largely ceremonial roles, to court over complaints that they slow down the work of elected governments.
“You are playing with fire,” said Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud. told the central government after the governor repeatedly blocked legislative work in the opposition-controlled state of Punjab. Will we remain a parliamentary democracy?
In Tamil Nadu, officials said they were struggling to expand a metro line in the capital Chennai because Modi’s government waited too long for New Delhi’s share of the funding.
In Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, the state government is suing the Modi government over what it says are arbitrary borrowing limits that have thrown the state budget into disarray and delayed payments.
In the western state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, Mr. Modi’s officials have splintered the state’s two largest parties through a combination of pressure from research firms and offers of incentives. Such ‘smash and grab’ politics, as critics have branded it, has paved the way for the BJP to emerge as the kingmaker in a coalition government.
In the Delhi capital region, the BJP appears determined to destroy a smaller party that came to power promising to improve basic services. The territory’s elected government has been stripped of key powers, and federal agencies have bogged down the party’s top leaders, Aam Aadmi, in corruption cases.
The party’s deputy leader and a key minister have been in prison for more than a year. On Thursday, in a dramatic overnight raid, government agents arrested Arvind Kejriwal, the party’s leader and Delhi’s chief minister, and charged him with financial crimes. He is the first serving prime minister to be arrested.
Delhi’s bitter political dispute is reflected in sewage overflows in parts of the city and long queues outside government hospitals.
Aam Aadmi tried to improve hospitals in part by relying on third-party contractors to input patient data. But the plan was caught in the crossfire between Mr. Modi’s officials and the territory’s elected government, and the contractors pulled staff from many hospitals after salaries were delayed for months.
“In their political fights, it is the public who suffers,” said Adit Kumar, a diabetic fabric salesman who recently waited with his wife outside a crowded hospital in New Delhi.
Saurabh Bhardwaj, an Aam Aadmi official in Delhi, said Mr. Modi’s intention was clear: to push the country toward one-party rule.
“You have reduced the work of the state government so much that people have started saying it is better to bring the BJP and only they can make that happen,” Mr Bhardwaj said. “That means the federal structure will collapse.”
The federal state’s biggest fault line pits the wealthier south against Modi’s support base in the north.
With the exception of a brief period in the state of Karnataka, when the BJP took control by orchestrating defections, the party has failed to win power in the five southern states.
Officials there say Mr. Modi is trying to stop them over their refusal to align with his brand of politics, including his party’s stoking of tensions between Hindus and Muslims and his attempt to use Hindi – which has not become mainstream in the south spoken – to change. a national language.
The resentment is heightened by complaints that the South gets proportionately less in return for the tax money it sends to New Delhi. Since the northern states have large populations and lag far behind in basic development, they receive a larger share of the revenue.
There are also serious concerns in the south that the redistribution of seats in parliament, once a long-delayed national census is finally conducted, will punish the south for its success in reducing birth rates, a key to its relative prosperity.
With its past investments in infrastructure, education and public health – the result of a unique mix of political, cultural and historical differences in the South – the region is better positioned to drive India’s ambition for high-end manufacturing. Modi’s politically driven approach could, his opponents say, undermine his ambitions to build India into a major economic power.
Federal Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman rejected claims that the revenue was unfairly distributed, saying the central government was releasing the states’ share “and on time”.
“We want every part of the country to prosper,” Mr. Modi said in Parliament after the protest by state leaders in New Delhi, casting himself as a strong proponent of “competitive, cooperative federalism.”
By putting pressure on state governments, analysts say, Modi is simply exploiting structural flaws in India’s constitution, which created a republic — a quasi-federal union of states — after the British left in 1947.
The Indian National Congress party, which ruled India unchallenged in the early decades after independence, abused the excessive constitutional powers given to the central government over budgetary matters to stem the rise of competitors.
However, from the late 1980s onwards, the decline of the Congress ushered in an era of coalition politics, with regional parties finding representation in New Delhi.
This was also the period when India opened its highly centralized economy to the free market. As growth ensued, the distribution of resources became subject to more pressure and pressure between the central and state governments.
“The rise of regional powers made the Center committed to certain principles,” said Kalaiyarasan A., assistant professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. “The 1990s were a golden age of federalism.”
Today, Mr. Modi is trying to reshape Indian federalism with his “dual engine.”
In opposition-held states, Mr. Modi has offered infrastructure and welfare projects, branded with his name or that of his office, to position himself as India’s sole engine of development and growth.
When embarking on joint projects, state parties face a political price: they will only get the money if they agree to the Modi branding.
And if they resist?
In 2022, Ms. Sitharaman, the finance minister, stopped at a store in the southern state of Telangana that was distributing rice rations as part of a joint program in which the central government provided most of the financing. Mr Modi’s photo was not shown there. Ms Sitharaman lashed out at state officials.
“This is the work our Prime Minister is doing for his people,” said Ms Sitharaman said. “Our people will come and install the Prime Minister’s photo, and you as a district administrator will ensure that it is not removed, that it is not torn, that it is not degraded.”