Mark Tully misunderstanding Subsidiarity

Mark Tully, who appears to be still alive, writes in the Hindustan Times- 

There is a principle of European law known as subsidiarity. Under that principle, the European Union can only act if it can be shown that the action taken at that rarefied level would be more effective than action taken at the national or local level. In other words, decisions should be taken as near the grassroots as possible.

This only makes sense if people are themselves paying for what they get. It does not make sense if money is being redistributed. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Otherwise the arrangement is not 'incentive compatible'. The guy paying the bill finds ways to weasel out of doing so because he is not enamoured of what is being done with the money. This in turn means that you get a complicated system of kickbacks and corrupt deals. Thus E.U subsidiarity meant that 'deprived areas' got money to spend on shite projects. There was a pretence that locals were benefiting from this type of pork barrel politics. But they weren't really. They were being fucked over. That's why, in England & Wales, areas which were net recipients of EU funds nevertheless voted for Brexit. 

Subsidiarity should surely underpin the relations between Indian states and the central government

Yes. There should be no persistent net fiscal transfers. 

because the country is a federation

It is not a federation. It is a Union. 

with power divided between the central government, state governments and panchayats. 

in other words, the country is honeycombed at every level with the corruption, incompetence and inertia of a politico-bureaucratic class. Thus it will remain very very poor. 

But there has always been a question mark over the extent to which India is a federation.

Nonsense! It is a Union which has vigorously put down secessionist movements. 

Many years ago, I heard the distinguished civil servant, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and confidant of Jawaharlal Nehru, LK Jha, say India had “a centrist Constitution with federal trimmings”.

The Constitution is wholly centrist. The Centre decides what is or isn't a State or Union Territory. It can always impose President's Rule on one excuse or another the Bommai decision notwithstanding. 

Over the last week or so, its federalism which has been questioned in the rowdy controversy in Parliament over the government taking decisions on agriculture and other subjects which many state governments insist it is their right to take.

The controversy is bogus. The State has no right to force farmers to sell their produce only in places where a corrupt intermediary class takes a cut. Why is Tully invoking the notion of subsidiarity in connection with economic liberalization? Does he not understand that producers should be able to decide for themselves what to do with their produce?

The government has insisted that it needs to legislate so that all farmers, everywhere in India, have the freedom to sell their produce anywhere.

While the States are welcome to offer them a better deal. What they are losing is a captive market.  

The prime minister did promise co-operative federalism when he first came to power but as Member of Parliament (MP) Dinesh Raj of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) said: “The cooperative federalism the Prime Minister claimed to have championed is going exactly the other way.”

Tully means Danish Ali- a protege of Deve Gowda who, however, could not secure him a Rajya Sabha seat from Karnataka which is why he went over to Mayawati. 

Congress MP Manish Tewari told Parliament a bill about the governance of cooperative banks was a frontal assault on the federal structure of the Constitution. The manner in which the bills were passed, the lack of discussion, the questionable parliamentary procedures could not be described as cooperative.

But the Opposition are now considered to be a bunch of obstreperous thugs.  

At one stage, seven bills were passed in under four hours in the Rajya Sabha.

The lockdown has had a silver lining.

Nor, of course, could the abuse of the Deputy Speaker of the Rajya Sabha by Opposition members be described as cooperative.

But it was what we had come to expect. 

When the states agreed to surrender their rights to levy a number of different taxes and the central government replaced them with the one Goods and Services Tax (GST), chief ministers (CMs) were guaranteed that any loss of income they suffered would be made up by the central government for five years. Now, with the decline in economic activity caused by the pandemic, the central government does not have the revenue from GST to compensate the states. The CMs say the Centre should borrow money to pay the compensation guaranteed to them, but the Centre insists that the states should borrow money to fund any deficit they suffer.

So, because of COVID, the States would have had to borrow even if there was no GST.  

Why does federalism matter so much?

We haven't had federalism. India could not have pursued a Socialist path if States had economic freedom.  

India is rightly proud of its diversity and it is federalism which protects that diversity.

No. It is because India is a Union that it has not broken down into more homogeneous units. The fact is India has had to redraw Provincial boundaries all the time. It is the opposite of a Federation like the USA where the States pre-existed the Union.  

Take, for instance, language. Without the creation of linguistic states with their own official languages, what would the fate of Tamil in the South, or Oriya in the East, Gujarati in the West and Punjabi in the North have been?

What the fuck is Tully talking about? Tamil and Telugu existed side by side in the Madras Presidency as did Gujarati and Marathi in Bombay Presidency. The Telugus agitated for a separate state. But they have since split up into smaller units. It is possible to argue that 'Hindi' has replaced Haryanvi or Magahi and so forth because of the action of the State. But it might have happened anyway through Tardean mimetics and market forces.

Federalism should also play an important role in the system of checks and balances intended to prevent the accretion of too much power at the Centre.

Why 'should' it do so? So as to preserve slavery in the American South?  

It should increase the efficiency of a democracy because its principle of subsidiarity reduces the inefficiencies of top-down government.

Or, it permits entrenched elites to extract rents and perpetuate exploitative practices.  

Unfortunately, recent events have shown how far India is from being a cooperative federation or union of states.

Recent events, like less recent events, show that people who talk bollocks about Indian politics have shit inside their brains.  

Without cooperation, Indian federalism will be just a trimming.

There is no Indian Federalism. There is a country with a billion Hindus- 80 percent of the population. It is now ruled by a party which identifies with Hinduism. Whitey may not like this. Whitey may feel 'Diversity' should increase. But White peeps don't seem too happy with increasing it on their own soil.