The sight of large numbers of brown people abducted by armed and masked officers from streets, public spaces and homes in the US and detained (and sometimes deported to gulags-for-hire like those in El Salvador) over the last few months has shocked many in the world who saw them as brutal assaults on individual rights and civilized decency. Less often commented upon is Trump administration’s systematic assaults on the basic federal structure in the US. In less than one year these have taken several different forms, examples of which are given below.

1. Threats to withhold federal funding from states and localities to compel compliance with the administration’s policy priorities, such as those related to “sanctuary cities” (which limit local cooperation with federal immigration authorities in order to protect immigrants), education policies (e.g., DEI—Diversity, Equity, Inclusion– programs), and election laws (even before Mamdani’s victory in New York, Trump threatened to withhold federal funds and have National Guard troops set upon the city, I presume for its unpardonable crime of electing Mamdani.)
2. Confrontational postures with states that resist unilateral and arbitrary federal policies
3. Federal overreach on state issues, like the attempt to exert federal authority over matters traditionally reserved for states, including election administration (e.g., mandating proof of citizenship for voting), public safety (e.g., deploying the National Guard to several cities without state Governor’s consent, or federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents arbitrarily taking over local police functions)
4. Federal challenge of several state laws (like those in California) that limit the assistance state and local law enforcement could provide to federal immigration agents
5. Federal violation of limits to federal agency power on state implementation of the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations
6. During the recent government shutdown, the Trump administration’s cutting off federally funded projects in states run by Democrats

And so on. On many of these matters lower courts have already ruled against the Trump administration, and some are awaiting judgments from the Supreme Court. More than violations of law, the upending of long-standing norms and conventions in federal-state relations has been simply outrageous.

Meanwhile, in India, another large, lapsed, democracy, the assaults on federalism have been on-going for more than a decade; they have been equally systematic and performatively aggressive, and sometimes much more damaging.

From the onset of the constitution in 1950 Indian federalism has been by design much weaker than in the US. The architects of the constitution were worried about possible dangers of the state structure breaking down after the trauma of the Partition and the associated mayhem, and they also thought a strong central government would be necessary for giving leadership to the process of economic development and social change. Not merely was the central government assigned unusual powers (like the ‘residual’ powers in the constitution, unlike in the US), in economic affairs it has had access to much larger and more elastic sources of tax revenue (the states in India cannot tax income, for example) and more power to borrow. Today while the state governments incur about 64 per cent of total government expenditure, they collect only about 38 per cent of the revenue (much lower in the poorer states), and their borrowing power is subject to central approval. There is thus a fiscal imbalance and the consequent dependence on the central government built into the system.

In the quarter century of 1989-2014, however, with powerful regional political parties ruling many states and coalition governments in New Delhi, the imbalance in Indian fiscal arrangements was partly and informally corrected through negotiations, but these corrections were not institutionalized. Since 2014 under the current regime those arrangements have been largely discarded, by a power that is over-centralized (mainly in the Prime Minister’s Office). This regime has regularly spouted platitudes on ‘cooperative federalism’ while systematically undermining it, and strengthening the unitary aspects of the government structure.

In fact, over the last ten years or so federalism has been battered in various ways; let us point to some of them.

(1) The most egregious has been the way the BJP-led central government in 2019 abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, by which the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir had enjoyed a special status and autonomy; the latter was summarily stripped of that autonomy. (Such special autonomy for some states was part of the deliberately asymmetrical federalism that Indian constitution had adopted —a few north-eastern states still have this autonomy on some matters). In a completely arbitrary and unilateral way, that will be unthinkable in most federal polities of the world, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was broken into two, and their status was downgraded into centrally administered territories, to add insult to injury. After 5 years, local elections were held in 2024, with many stringent restrictions on the functioning of the elected government, but the promised statehood is yet to be restored.

(2) The central government took a somewhat similar step against the state of Delhi (when it was run by an opposition party). It passed a law in 2023 that seized key administrative functions from Delhi (such as transfers and postings of bureaucrats), effectively stripping the government of some of its executive powers.

(3) Governors, who are primarily titular representatives of the central administration at the state level, are now regularly used in states ruled by opposition parties to harass and hinder elected governments there.

(4) Large areas in some of the border states have been put under the authority of Border Security Forces run by the central Home Ministry.

(5) Much of the grant-giving authority of the erstwhile Planning Commission, that used to be exercised in consultation with the states, was unilaterally and unceremoniously transferred to the central Ministry of Finance, after the abolition of the Planning Commission in 2014.

(6) Centralization of welfare schemes, bypassing state governments and giving credit for them to the Prime Minister, have weakened state-level welfarist Chief Ministers (including those belonging to the ruling party).

(7) Even on welfare schemes only partly funded by the center, funds have often been denied to the opposition-run states on flimsy grounds like ‘branding’ (for example, for not properly publicizing the Prime Minister in the display of the name of the scheme). In September 2022 Nirmala Sitharaman, the Indian Finance Minister, on a visit to the state of Telengana scolded a district administrator as she found a ration shop distributing subsidized food grains to poor people without displaying Modi’s photo!

(8) Central bureaucrats often bypass state governments and give orders directly to district-level administrators.

(9) Constitutionally assigned state subjects like law and order, agriculture and public health are often trespassed by unilateral central actions, for example:

1. misuse of central investigative agencies to hound opposition leaders in the state
2. wanton use of controversial (supposedly anti-terrorist) laws like Unlawful Activities Prevention Act against minorities and dissenters in the state
3. arbitrary Farm Laws rammed through Parliament without any discussion with the state governments (later repealed under pressure of farmers’ agitations)
4. during the pandemic, use of the central Disaster Management Act that did not take into account the varied stages of preparation and disease incidence in different states.

(10) Imposition of central laws in education and labor with very little consultation with the states even though these subjects belong to the concurrent list of the constitution. (Large amounts of education funds to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal governments, run by opposition parties, have been blocked because those governments did not fully agree with the unilaterally adopted central New Education Policy 2020). Even on a concurrent subject like criminal law, 3 major criminal laws were passed in Parliament in 2023 without any consultation with the states.

(11) Discrimination against opposition-ruled states is almost openly acknowledged when the ruling party leaders at state election times loudly appeal to the electorate on slogans about the advantages the state could get if its government were aligned party-wise with the central government (the term used is ‘double-engine’ government).

(12) The introduction of a unified (tax-harmonizing) value-added tax in the country in the form of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), along with the operation of the GST council since 2016, has been hailed as a milestone in the Indian federal bargain in which both the states and the center made some compromises in sovereignty and tax autonomy. But in the GST council the central government has an effective veto, though the convention has so far been to take decisions in the council by consensus of the central and state governments. I remain skeptical of the process of reaching such a ‘consensus’. Take, for example, the recent (September 2025) decision on a major GST rate simplification. It was first publicly announced by Modi at his Independence Day speech in front of a vast crowd at the Red Fort in New Delhi, without any prior consultation with the state governments (even though this has significant impact on their revenues). After the Red Fort public pronouncement, the rate simplification decision was adopted with ‘consensus’ at the subsequent GST council meeting, but in that meeting no discussion was allowed on the revenue consequences for the states.

(13) In 2024 the central cabinet endorsed a proposal—currently under review of a parliamentary committee—for ‘one nation, one election’ that aims to do away with India’s current system of staggered elections for state and national legislative assemblies, replacing it with a framework of simultaneous elections. If implemented, this will accelerate a move toward turning India’s parliamentary system into more of a presidential one and curb the autonomy and flexibility of elections of state governments. In general, the attitude of ‘one nation, one everything-–language, culture, leader’, which the ruling party frequently brags about, is exactly the opposite of the principle of federalism in a large diverse country.

Federal interferences with state rights have been there for decades both in US and India, but the sheer brazenness and the dizzying pace of the current assaults on federalism have been unprecedented. Not to speak of the crass violation of long-standing norms. Of course, in both countries in the face of all this the high judiciary, which is the ultimate custodian of the constitution and its vaunted checks and balances, has by and large behaved or acted in a way that can only be called supine.

(Pranab Bardhan is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.)