Essay · Section A19 September 2026

Indian federalism has never been about giving states unlimited autonomy; it has always been about distributing coercive power fairly.

The Maratha reservation case, the KPSC conduct inquiry, and the Kishau Dam agreement — three separate stories from today's papers — all pose the same underlying question: how much power can a state wield before it risks becoming a law unto itself? Indian federalism is not about state autonomy as an end in itself; it is about distributing the state's capacity to coerce fairly across geography and preventing any single government from monopolising the power to tax, regulate, police, or adjudicate.

The Maratha reservation case tests this principle at the intersection of article 15(4) and the 50% ceiling. When a state enacts a reservation law, it is distributing the coercive power of the state (the power to exclude others from scarce public goods like education and employment) across communities. The Supreme Court's 50% ceiling is not an arbitrary limit; it is a structural safeguard that says: you may not concentrate more than half of that power in any one configuration of beneficiary groups, because if you do, the residual power left for merit-based or other-group-based allocation becomes so small that the state effectively ceases to be the state of all its people and becomes instead the state of a coalition of groups. The 102nd Amendment gave states power to identify their own backward classes, but it did not give them power to redefine federalism itself.

The KPSC probe reveals a subtler problem: state-level regulatory autonomy can metastasize into state-level opacity. When a public service commission operates without transparent standards, without public accountability, and without a credible appellate mechanism, the state's power to recruit becomes the state's power to dispense patronage. That is not federalism; that is state capture. The solution is not centralisation (moving all recruitment to the UPSC) but localisation — transparency, published grading rubrics, video-recorded interviews, and appellate oversight that is visible and contestable. Federalism needs checks and balances, and those checks have to be internal to the state, not imposed from above.

The Kishau Dam agreement represents federalism working correctly. An eight-year deadlock over cost-sharing is resolved not by the Centre imposing a solution but by the Centre absorbing 90% of the cost — a fiscal transfer that respects Himachal Pradesh's position while unblocking the project. This is cooperative federalism: states negotiate, disagree, and then find a fiscal or institutional arrangement that all can live with. But — and this is critical — it works only because both sides genuinely want the outcome (electricity, irrigation, water) more than they want to win a contest of wills. The moment a state uses a resource standoff as a political weapon rather than a genuine negotiation, cooperative federalism breaks down.

The foundational insight is this: federalism is not about how much the state government can do; it is about how power is constrained. The 50% reservation ceiling, the KPSC audit, and the Kishau cost-sharing formula are all examples of the same principle — the state may act, but within boundaries that ensure it does not cease to be a state of all its people. That boundary is what holds Indian federalism together. When states erode it (through unaccountable recruitment, through reservation policies that cross 50%, through resource hoarding in federal projects), they are not practising federalism; they are practising state-level absolutism. The Centre's role, in turn, is not to centralise everything but to insist that these boundaries be maintained — through judicial review, through constitutional limits, through fiscal incentives that reward transparency and accountability.

The hard question for future Darpan essays: as India's states grow economically diverse (some are now richer than many nation-states, others are deeply poor), how does Indian federalism distribute burden fairly without devolving into a race to the bottom, where rich states capture richer people's tax revenue and leave poor states to manage poverty on starvation budgets? That is a question the Kishau agreement begins to touch — it says, if a project benefits the whole country, the country pays for it, not just the state it sits in. Extend that principle: if a rich state's growth is enabling, it has an obligation to contribute to national infrastructure (health, education, transport) in poor states, not merely to maximise its own state's return on investment. Federalism without solidarity devolves into a competition among states to become as wealthy as possible, leaving behind those who start behind. Federalism with solidarity — where the nation invests in its own — holds India together.