Driving Without Fiscal Borders May Be Unsafe

In an age where rich and vivid information is ever more easily available to the common man, public opinion about some matters including socio-political issues is dramatically different, and much more mature, than what it used to be about a decade ago.

Taxation is one such socio-political issue that interests every individual member of a nation, even to the extent of leading to heavy scrutiny of the very grounds on which a State claims rights to levy and collect compulsory taxes from its citizens. Libertarians in many democracies are heard questioning the very moral right of an elected government to continue to tax its citizens when it is own role in some aspects of public life (viz market and industry) is not open to scrutiny. Despite these developments, devising newer methods of taxation has attracted academic and political attention and is even getting hailed for its welcome breakthroughs and reforms in financing governments.

The need of the hour, however, is to question the very right of governments to continue to tax in newer ways amid trends of increasingly head-heavy governments - those governments whose higher tiers are heavier because of being less decentralized.

The maturation of conventional methods of taxation into VAT in 2005, and into the newly proposed GST since 2009, is a case in point. Lately it was also reported that the NDA government had offered as incentives to States endorsing the GST regime ways to make-up for losses they would incur due to GST. The regime is so strict in its intent that this incentive has been rolled out to subside opposition in Rajysabha, not really to compensate for the potential losses States would incur.

On similar lines is a hearsay driven revolution being orchestrated by some migrant netizens across the country, especially in those cities that receive lot of middle-class migrants. This particular revolution, apparently originating from Bengaluru, claims to raise its voice for a "One Nation, One Road Tax" regime. The petitioner of this change not only twists the words of a piece of legislation on this website, but also subtly bases his argument on a recent opinion expressed by the NDA government to sweep all RTOs into a centrally controlled authority - a mess actually.

Be it GST or the Road Tax bill, moves in this direction by the central government are bound to jeopardize fiscal stature of State governments. Any legislation made or amended to deprive States of the power to collect taxes under its own legitimate subjects would not only deprive States of funds but also constrain them politically in the long run. The State government loses its rightful hold over State subjects this way. This is not good at all for Federalism that is promised to be upheld in this democracy.

We should have State Constitutions, shouldn't we?

Having one constitution, such as the current one, for the entire Indian nation and not letting States to have their respective constitutions is like taking a set of jigsaw pieces and pressing them to fit within a shape of player's choice! No, the pieces fit in only one way, and that way is only decided by the pieces themselves.

Presence of a Constitution of India (COI) on top of suspended State constitutions is perhaps the root cause for those umpteen amendments India has made to the COI and for the prevalence of dire problems in India's socio-economic landscape. For instance, the number of appendages made to Article 371 - the special status gimmick - displays the finicky and fluid state of vision over national policy. Such piecewise approach to making modifications in COI not only provide a reason for its bulky nature but also explain why and how it has failed to perform its original intended duty in this democracy. The very size of the constitution and the vast demography that it intends to acquire under its purview makes it increasingly untenable given the increasing awareness in people about the sovereign and republic nature of this democracy.

The year 2014 is turning out to be an year for the States to reckon with. Chief Ministers of multiple States - Delhi, AP and, just this afternoon, Bihar - have expressed anguish at the alleged misdeeds committed by the central government against the wishes of people living in their States. These can be directly attributed to a rather convolved Constitution of India that often lands even constitutional experts in moments of introspection and doubt; a doubt that shatters the confidence of people in their nation, and also its large, bulky constitution.

This bulky constitution resembles a big fat balloon with multiple punctures - you just cannot say where it will fly, meaning where this constitution will lead India to cannot be predicted easily. The mirth is higher when you have smaller, yet a more colourful bunch of balloons in your hand than one large punctured balloon in flight. You get the analogy, right?

In another State, Tamilnadu, the CM expresses her desire to free a set of convicts who've been in prison for nearly two decades, but the constitution by some weird combination, which too is figured out after much deliberation among experts, makes her seek the Centre's approval despite the fact that Police is a State subject as per Schedule 7 of the Constitution of India itself! Instead of having the Schedule 7 dictate what the States must govern and what the Centre must (& can), wouldn't it be rather more convenient and more appropriate for the States to have their own constitutions and the COI address subjects left behind unattended by the State constitutions? Wouldn't that be real decentralization and real federalism? Wouldn't that be in line with the real spirit of a democracy where the degree of delegation of governance droops with distance - both physical and representative.

The repercussion of this constitutional arrangement is also felt on the linguistic diversity of India. With regards to language planning and policy, Constitution of India is mired in controversy - controversies based on assumptions that go squarely against the nation's linguistic diversity.

The official language act, for instance, which is a statute law spun off from Articles 343 & 344 of the COI, forbids usage of any Indian language apart from Hindi at the Centre. This is a clear violation of human rights happening right under the aegis of a constitution that lays the political framework of this nation. This violation could have been precluded had the language policy of the nation been a linear summation and intercourse of the language policies of all States.

As the famous quote goes, people of India live in their States, and the Centre really need not have any business directly with the people. With such a natural arrangement of business, it is implied that there is very little need for such an all-encompassing constitution at the Centre whereas the need for such a constitution certainly exists at the State level. Time to write one?

The Anti-Incumbency Inherent in the Constitution!

ROOT causing Congress party's decimation in the recent State Assembly elections, especially in Delhi, and a similar decimation of the BJP in Karnataka earlier this year, one can find that quite a lot of blame of lacklustre performance at the State level is being attributed to the lacklustre performance of the ruling party at the Center. Said in other words, people heard lauding Congress' good governance under Sheila Dikshit in Delhi last 15 years are attributing this December election defeat to the poor governance by Congress at the Center.

This blaming scheme probably has its roots in the Schedule 7 of the Constitution of India, which distributes such subjects of governance to the Center that had rather been in State control so that a performance or failure of a State government can clearly be attributed to the State government alone. This arrangement of subjects - while it gives more control to those that run the Central government - creates a confusion among voters while assessing the performance or failure of their incumbent State ruling party, thereby rendering them clueless about which party their vote must go in current elections.

Whether this confusion is the genius of the Constitution or of the people that reserve the right to remove such confusion is an easy question to answer. Its the people, who hold the right to amend the Constitution - the legislators, that need to act and amend the Schedule-7 so as to re-arrange subjects of governance between the State and the Center. These people include elected members of State assemblies apart from MPs, for according to Art 368 an amendment to Schedule-7 needs approval from more than half of the State assemblies.

Now, in the interest of those political parties that have aspirations at both State and Central level politics I believe there is value in picking up this cause of an amendment to the 7th Schedule that is also long pending. There are some parties like the BJP, of course, that would like to keep the 7th schedule that way, what with the manufactured image of some of their larger than thou candidates whose projected national image is expected to win them State elections also. But is it really going to help once they gain Central power and continue to be subject to the same Constitution that is bound to pull them down, eventually?

Isn't it time we realized why people get bored of incumbent political parties even if, for a moment, we assume those parties were doing the right things? Isn't it time we saw the anti-incumbency inherent in our Constitution?