Reacting to a news report on Niti Aayog CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam’s remarks that the Narendra Modi government, immediately after coming to power in 2014, tried to significantly cut funds allocated to the States, the Congress on Thursday accused the government of “over centralisation, absolute control and dismantling India’s federalism”.
Mr. Subramanyam revealed during a seminar on financial reporting in India, organised by the Centre for Social Economic Progress and relayed on YouTube live, that the 14th Finance Commission had recommended 42% share of Central taxes for the States, but the Modi government wanted to keep it down to 33%.
Mr. Subramanyam further claimed that the Prime Minister tried to “off-record parley” to get the chairman of the Finance Commission, Y.V. Reddy, who was earlier the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, to pare down his recommendations on the revenue share. Mr. Reddy was, however, unyielding, the story by The Reporters’ Collective published in Al Jazeera said.
In a post on X, Congress General Secretary (Communication) Jairam Ramesh said, “When the Prime Minister failed in this endeavour, his government ‘was forced to hastily redo its maiden full Budget in 48 hours and slash funding’ for social welfare programmes.” Mr. Subramanyam said that the Budget was rewritten in two days after the negotiation failed.
Mr. Ramesh also underlined the policy think tank CEO’s comment that the Modi government’s Budget claims are “covered in layers and layers of attempts to cover the truth”.
“This blatant disregard for a Constitutional body exposes the Prime Minister’s real niyat: over centralisation, absolute control and the dismantling of India’s federalism. Nor can we ignore the human impact of this attempted cornering of mandated funds for the States, denying them of their Constitutional right. State governments finance everything from law and order to school education, and have had fewer sources of revenue after the introduction of GST,” Mr. Ramesh added.
The Congress leader added that the central idea of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra that kick-started on January 14 is to ensure “political justice, strengthen federalism, and to uphold Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Constitution that begins by stating, ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’.”
