State Legislatures: Democracy Beyond Delhi

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Coverage of Indian politics is dominated by Parliament in New Delhi, but for most Indians the government that matters is the one in the state capital. Police, public order, prisons, public health and hospitals, agriculture, land, local government, water and, in practice, the delivery of most schooling are state responsibilities. India has twenty eight states and eight union territories, several of the latter with their own legislatures, and the largest of them, Uttar Pradesh, has a population greater than that of Brazil. A state legislature in India is therefore not a provincial council in any small sense; several of them govern more people than most member states of the United Nations.

How a state legislature is built

Part VI of the Constitution sets out the structure. Every state has a Legislative Assembly, the Vidhan Sabha, whose members are directly elected from single member constituencies for a term of five years unless dissolved earlier. Some states also have a Legislative Council, the Vidhan Parishad, an indirectly elected upper house. Only a minority of states maintain one, and Article 169 allows Parliament to create or abolish a council if the state assembly passes a resolution to that effect by a special majority, which is why the list of states with councils has changed over the decades. Councils are weak: they can delay ordinary legislation but not block it, and they have no role in money bills beyond a short suspensive power, so an assembly determined to pass a law will pass it.

Each state has a Governor appointed by the President, in practice on the advice of the Union government. The Governor gives assent to bills, invites a leader to form a government, and may reserve certain bills for the consideration of the President. On paper this is ceremonial. In practice the office has been the most contested institution in Indian federalism, because a Governor appointed by one party may be dealing with a state government run by another. Disputes over how long a Governor may sit on a bill without acting, over the choice of who is invited to form a government after an inconclusive election, and over recommendations for President's rule under Article 356 have gone repeatedly to the Supreme Court. The judgment in S. R. Bommai versus Union of India in 1994 is the landmark: it held that a government's majority must be tested on the floor of the house rather than determined by the Governor's assessment, and that the imposition of President's rule is subject to judicial review. That decision sharply reduced, though it did not eliminate, the dismissal of state governments for political convenience.

The division of powers and where the money is

The Seventh Schedule of the Constitution divides subjects into three lists. The Union List covers defence, foreign affairs, currency, railways and similar national matters. The State List covers police, public order, public health, agriculture and land. The Concurrent List covers subjects on which both may legislate, including education, criminal law, forests and marriage, with Union law prevailing in the event of conflict. Education was moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the forty second amendment during the Emergency period in 1976, a change that still shapes disputes over national education policy.

Legislative power without revenue is limited power, and this is where Indian federalism becomes genuinely contentious. States carry most of the spending responsibility for services people actually use, but the Union collects the larger and more elastic share of taxes. The gap is bridged by transfers: a share of central taxes distributed according to a formula recommended every five years by a Finance Commission appointed under Article 280, plus grants and centrally sponsored schemes. The Goods and Services Tax, introduced in July 2017, further pooled indirect taxation into a joint structure governed by the GST Council, in which the Union and the states vote together under a weighted formula. States gave up substantial independent taxing power in that reform in exchange for compensation arrangements, and the settlement of those arrangements has been a recurring source of friction.

A second and increasingly loud dispute concerns representation itself. The number of Lok Sabha seats allotted to each state has been frozen on the basis of older census figures, with the freeze extended by constitutional amendment, precisely so that states which successfully reduced their birth rates, largely in the south, would not lose national representation to states whose populations grew faster. When that freeze lapses, delimitation will redistribute seats, and southern states have argued forcefully that they should not be penalised for demographic success. This is a real, unresolved constitutional argument with no obvious technical answer.

How well the legislatures work

The quality of state legislatures varies enormously and is, on the available evidence, declining in an important respect: they sit for very few days. Research by PRS Legislative Research, which tracks legislative activity in India, has consistently found that many state assemblies meet for only a handful of sittings a year, sometimes fewer than twenty, and pass bills with minimal debate, occasionally several in a single day. A legislature that does not sit cannot scrutinise, and the committee systems that do the detailed work in Parliament are weaker or absent at state level.

The anti defection law, added by the fifty second amendment in 1985 and set out in the Tenth Schedule, was intended to stop legislators switching parties for office. It disqualifies a member who defects, with an exception for the merger of two thirds of a legislature party. Its effect has been double edged: it has reduced casual floor crossing, but it also binds members to vote as their party whip directs on almost everything, which removes the individual legislator's incentive to develop independent expertise, and it has generated a large body of litigation about the timing of decisions by Speakers, who are themselves usually party figures.

None of this means state legislatures are unimportant. Some of the most consequential policy in India, on public health in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, on land and industrial policy in Gujarat and Maharashtra, on welfare delivery in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha, has originated in states and then been copied nationally. The competitive federalism this produces is one of the more underrated engines of Indian policy change, and it happens almost entirely outside the frame of Delhi based political reporting.

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