Confronting the Neo-fascist Assault on Federalism

The Supreme Court of India’s landmark verdict on April 8, 2025, striking down the Tamil Nadu Governor’s indefinite withholding of ten bills marks a crucial moment for federalism. The Supreme Court ruled that the Governor’s actions; ostensibly keeping bills reserved for presidential assent without any justification, violated the Constitution and inter alia amounted to an undermining of democratic accountability. This judgement of the Supreme Court was delivered in the backdrop of a growing trend of partisan obstruction by Governors appointed by the BJP-led Union government working to obstruct the functioning of opposition-ruled states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, etc. This obstruction often took the form of such Governors systematically delaying or paralysing legislative processes.

The Supreme Court’s judgment went beyond a mere procedural rebuke by invoking its discretionary powers under Article 142 of the Constitution of India, thereby ensuring the immediate implementation of the stalled bills. These bills included critical legislation on social justice and education reforms. Using the office of the Governor to undermine state governments ruled by the opposition is not only a means to undermine federalism but also a means to coerce state governments into incorporating themselves into the neoliberal project. Consent for this two-pronged offensive is sought to be manufactured through the activation of the third prong involving an attempt to saffronise India. Let’s see how.

Role of Governors in Undermining Federalism

The constitutional office of the Governor, serving at the behest of the Union government (aka “pleasure of the President of India”), was conceived as a means to limit authentic federalism, whereby the Union government sought to indirectly influence the working of state governments.

However, since 2014, this role has been explicitly weaponised to try and subvert opposition-ruled states. The case of Tamil Nadu exemplified this misuse: the Governor withheld assent to many bills for over two years. The Governor of Tamil Nadu has become the ideological fulcrum of Hindutva opposition to the progressive ethos of the state. This progressive ethos is derived from a complex synthesis of the work of Periyar, Ambedkar, and Marx and remains a work in progress.

The Supreme Court’s unprecedented step to invoke Article 142 in the case of Tamil Nadu underscored the severity of the crisis of federalism under the neo-fascist dispensation. By directing the Union government to facilitate presidential assent within 15 days, the Court effectively bypassed the Governor’s office, which it felt had become a “tool of partisan sabotage”. This intervention is reflective of the higher judiciary’s awareness of the structural imbalance in India’s federal framework. Similar patterns of gubernatorial obstruction have emerged in all opposition-ruled states, including deliberately delaying legislative sessions, illegal interference in administrative procedures, and refusing assent to bills passed by the state legislatures. It is arguable that such gubernatorial actions violate the Basic Structure doctrine, which enshrines federalism as a foundational principle of the Constitution of India. These anti-constitutional maneuvers are not isolated procedural violations but part of a deliberate strategy to centralise power by paralysing state legislatures. Thereby, the neo-fascist dispensation undermines the democratic ethos that posits that India’s existence as a constitutional republic derives from unity in diversity and not uniformity.

Attenuation of Federalism along the Neoliberal Trajectory

The practice of federalism was always tenuous, but the explicit transition to a neoliberal trajectory since the 1990s has refortified the anti-federal proclivities of the Union government of India. The proliferation of the neoliberal project under the hegemony of international finance capital has involved ongoing attempts to systematically dismantle the fiscal autonomy of states. Early measures, such as the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) restrictive credit policies, pushed states into debt traps, with interest payments consuming a large fraction of non-developmental expenditures by the 2000s. Subsequent Finance Commissions have institutionalised conditionalities, tying debt relief to neoliberal policies like de facto or de jure privatisation of power, water, and other types of infrastructure. Besides, states were forced to cede jurisdiction over many economic activities, which resulted in their deepening fiscal dependency on the Union government of India.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST), implemented in 2017, epitomises this assault on federalism. GST stripped states of their constitutional authority to levy indirect taxes, a critical revenue source. The GST Council, though nominally representative of states, structurally favors the Union government of India, which holds an effective veto on all decisions. This quasi-unitary fiscal regime has had dire consequences. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, states faced severe liquidity crises due to deliberately delayed GST compensation, crippling their ability to fund healthcare and welfare schemes, resulting in millions of (officially unacknowledged) deaths.

Other unilateral decisions made by the Union government of India, such as Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and demonetisation, further illustrate this attenuation of federalism. FTAs negotiated without state consultation—like those with ASEAN—have devastated Kerala’s plantation economy through import surges. Likewise, demonetisation in 2016 had disproportionately adverse consequences on cash-dependent states. Co-operative banks, which are vital to the economies of Kerala and Maharashtra, were excluded from currency exchange, resulting in the exacerbation of economic distress by the working people. These policies, which the mainstream media presents as episodic initiatives unrelated to any larger project, in fact reflect a broader attempt to undermine federalism, thereby reducing states to passive implementers of the neoliberal agenda.

Judicial interventions since 1991 have, by and large, been in sync with the dictates of the neoliberal project. Consequently, judicial review tends to focus on overt constitutional violations by this or that functionary but does not interrogate the neo-fascist dispensation that enables these violations.

Hindutva as Ideological Driver of Anti-Federalism

The neo-fascist dispensation’s project to irredeemably attenuate Indian federalism, thereby hegemonising the neoliberal project in India, involves the deployment of Hindutva. The latter is deployed to manufacture consent for this hegemony. This deployment is based on two pillars: one, cowardice with respect to metropolitan capital, as evidenced most recently by the servile response to Trump’s tariff war; second, a reinvention of history whereby unscientific claims about the ostensibly unitary origins of Indian civilisation and its alleged redemption after centuries of purported alien rule have hegemonised the public space.

For instance, the neo-fascist dispensation has unleashed an unprecedented wave of saffronisation of education with two objectives. First, the drive for saffronisation of education amounts to an acceptance of the permanence of India’s location at the lower and lower-middle reaches of the technological ladder that pertains to global production networks. Second, the saffronisation of education seeks to manufacture consent for its privatisation, commercialisation, and homogenisation. The use of the National Education Policy to redouble the imposition of Hindi, illegitimately trying to take over state universities, and the insistence on the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical admissions (that disadvantage the working people) are illustrative of this drive for saffronisation.

Likewise, the ongoing efforts to engage in delimitation of electoral constituencies disadvantage states that are outside North India and are completely antithetical to the constitutional prerogative of federalism. The neo-fascist dispensation seeks to cement its hegemony by disparaging federal initiatives that directly challenge this homogenising drive of Hindutva, whereby people’s movements in states like Tamil Nadu (that resist the imposition of Hindi), Kerala (that seeks to craft an alternative to the neoliberal project), and Punjab (that seeks to defend the peasantry and workers against corporate encroachment in agriculture) are framed as “anti-national”.

The neo-fascist dispensation’s deployment of fiscal levers and gubernatorial obstruction to suppress such federal movements reveals a strategic maneuver, under the hegemony of international finance capital, to try and make India secure for the neoliberal project by homogenising the country.

Conclusion: Federalism as Democratic Practice

The Supreme Court’s 2025 Tamil Nadu verdict, though significant, is a corrective to a symptom of the deployment of Governors to undermine opposition-led state governments. It does not engage with the underlying phenomenon of the neo-fascist dispensation’s attempt to extinguish federalism in order to secure the neoliberal project in India under the aegis of international finance capital.

The struggle for federalism is inseparable from the fight for India’s democracy as embodied in the Constitution of India and its practice by the democratic movement. Resisting the neo-fascist dispensation’s offensive against federalism is necessary to prevent the eroding of the pluralism that defines the nation.

To reclaim the constitutional republic, parties in the INDIA Bloc and people’s movements that lead the resistance to the neo-fascist dispensation must evolve democratic alternatives to the neoliberal project and eschew vain attempts to operate under the hegemony of international finance capital through the ideological trajectory of cosmopolitan neoliberalism. As argued previously, neo-fascism and cosmopolitan neoliberalism are two different routes of operating under the aegis of international finance capital. Federalism is a central plank of crafting a democratic alternative to the neo-fascist dispensation’s timidity towards international finance capital.

Shirin Akhter is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. C Saratchand is Professor, Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.