The Centre-State Relations in India

By Shiv Visvanathan,"Delhi cannot hold", The Indian Express, 28 March 28, 2008, OP-ED

I think the message of the information technology revolution and the rise of the regional parties has been lost on us. We read IT as the dominance of private over public. We read the new success stories in cricket and Bollywood as the rise of small town, as a diffusion of the myth of mobility. But our politicians and bureaucrats still behave like satraps from the capital visiting remote domains when they drop in on Gujarat or Kerala. The message coming from all over India is that Delhi is irrelevant. It might still legislate but its laws make little sense outside.
The danger of Delhi is that it feels an idea is good only if it exists in Delhi. So every tribal academy, research institution, major university has to be in Delhi. Ask yourself a simple question: why is national equal to Delhi when it is in reality an isolated city without even the vision of a cosmopolitan city state? Delhi legislates but it rarely invents, it controls but can hardly create. Every inmate sits with a committee gene in his soul. What Delhi does not realise is that India is seceding and the state does not even know it.
A nation state like India cannot remain intact without a collection of secessions. Secession is a hypothesis we must encourage. It need not be an act of treason, it could be a ritual of renewal. It should be as seasonal as migration.
Any imaginative democracy allows for secession, especially as temporary segmentation. Our notion of the Centre should not demand the fixity of Fevicol. The Centre should be a hypothesis reinvented constantly by the regions. Why should the idea of national be certified by Delhi? I am not denying the need for order, quality and standards. But why should order, control, hierarchy stem from a single source called the capital? Consider a set of simple anecdotes.
Imagine I want to start an institute for ecology. I begin the idea as institute for understanding pastoral and nomadic change or an attempt to look at the future of tribes. The standard notions of development, homogeneity, hierarchy would feel (a) that tribals should not have an idea of a tribal institute, and (b) to call it a national tribal or nomadic institute is an oxymoron.
If I am tribal, I am marginal; if I am nomadic, I am already decentred. Why do I need the capital’s certification to be national? The vision of national, regional, state level institutes is a hierarchised one. It makes no sense to a tribal in Jharkhand to create a national centre in Delhi. It is a form of detribalisation. Anyway, most of the new national institutes are mere fiefdoms for IAS officers out on a limb or planning a leisurely retirement.
Push the issue deeper. Our notions of security are Delhi-centric. We respond to any model of tribal rights as secession. If marginal tribals and peasants protest they are all dubbed as Naxal. What if I as a tribal were to say that forests belong to me? What if tribal areas were handed to local tribal councils? What if we were to say no forest land can be appropriated without a local referendum? Why can’t national interests be decided locally? Why should the idea of locality be so parochial? In fact, nationalism today requires the cosmopolitanism of localities thinking in terms of size and scale.
A nation state is a poor notion of the complexities of a nation. Just ask yourself a simple question. Why should the diaspora which has virtually seceded be given dual citizenship while a nomad or a pastoral group be arrested for crossing a boundary line? What is so sacrosanct about a boundary that we have to censor any picture that distorts it? A lot of what we call border violation is merely an expression of old ways of life, old memories questioning the illiteracy of boundary, a memory-less empty line that destroys ways of life that are struggling to survive. What is it about identity that needs fixity?
Modify the problem a bit. Why should we have an ICSSR in Delhi? In fact, why an Indian Council? Why not let different regions invent their own social science? Why bureaucratise it? ICSSRs don’t create social science any more than Knowledge Commission creates knowledge. Knowledge commissions only talk about science as certified statist knowledge.
What if we had a series of ‘local’ reports on tribal, craft knowledge, women’s knowledge, marginal ideas of coping, reports on how slums and neighbourhood create science and use it? We might arrive at more enlightened notions of waste or sensitive models of medical knowledge. A nation is a collection of absences. Secession is a reminder of the presences the nation treats as noise or silence. An aggregation of such reports would have at least given us a better idea of innovation that we currently have.
It is paradoxical that we talk of decentralising the organisation and not the nation. A few minor flexibilities, a few acts of delegation become canonised as decentralisation. We need to invent alternative possibilities, temporary acts of secession which tell the Centre it actually does not hold.
Secession does not have to be seen as threatening. Secession is first a playful attempt to rethink the frame of Centre/state. The Congress was once a collection of secessions, that is why it held India together. Today the Congress is a centrist frame, a little club in Delhi pretending it understands the country. English viceroys had a better sense of India than our prince in waiting in the party.
The diversity of India to which democracy is tied demands we break away from the current idea of Delhi. We have to invent alternative worlds before Delhi destroys us. The challenge is simple. Find ways to secede such that Delhi does not know it. The old slogan ‘Delhi door nahi’ should now be ‘Delhi door rahe’. Think of six ways to secede without the state knowing it.