It is the last frontier for India’s most powerful leader in decades.
Narendra Modi, in his 10 years as prime minister, has made it his mission to transform a complex and diverse country of 1.4 billion people into something approaching a monolith dominated by his sweeping Hindu nationalist vision.
The media, the national legislature, civil society, sometimes even the courts — all have largely bent to his will. But a critical group of prisoners remains: some of India’s wealthiest states, the driving force behind its rapid growth.
The future shape of the world’s largest democracy – and its economic trajectory – may rest on the power struggle that followed.
Mr Modi, who is well placed to win a third term in national elections starting on April 19, is wielding an increasingly heavy hand in what his opponents call an unfair drive to oust state governments that do not his party controls.
They accuse Mr. Modi’s administration of delaying federal money for major projects. imprisoning or prosecuting opposition leaders while shielding anyone who joins the prime minister’s party. obstructing the provision of essential services; and throw government policy into chaos.
The tensions are tearing at India’s delicate federal formula for power-sharing and political competition, which holds the country together across 28 states and eight territories.
Regional leaders have described the behavior of the central government, which wields more power than in federal systems like the United States, as that of a colonial sovereign. In the south, the most developed and innovative part of India, officials have spoken of a “separate nation” for their region if “patterns of injustice” continue.
Mr Modi and his lieutenants have in turn accused state leaders of harboring a “separatist mentality” and pursuing politics that could “break the nation”.
India’s move toward more centralized governance could hurt its overall growth, analysts say, as such efforts have done in the past. Major national spending programs focus on key development problems that the South mostly solved decades ago. If this region’s freedom to invest based on its own needs is curtailed, the effects could be far-reaching.
“It is ultimately self-defeating,” said P. Rajan, a cabinet minister in the government of the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Mr. Modi offers a simple solution: get states ruled by parties other than his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to participate.
He often uses car terminology to make his pitch. Those states, he says, could benefit from what he calls “dual engine” government, with one party — his own — working in sync at both the national and state levels.
If they don’t comply, states drop wrench after wrench in their governments’ projects, officials say, making it harder for them to fulfill their campaign promises. The BJP, relentlessly expanding its base, is waiting in the wings.
Last month, chief ministers of about half a dozen states staged a dramatic demonstration near the federal seat of power in New Delhi.
With placards reading “Our blood, our sweat, our tax” hanging behind them, they complained that Mr. Modi was using his outsized control over the distribution of revenues raised across India to consolidate his party and limit their state governments.
At the same time, Mr Modi was on a final tour of the country before the election dates were announced. In opposition states, he combined promises of billions of dollars in infrastructure and welfare projects with sharp criticism of local parties.
He is also being scorned. They have repeatedly sued state governors appointed by New Delhi, who hold largely ceremonial roles, over allegations that they delay the work of elected governments.
“You are playing with fire,” said Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud. told the central government after the governor in the opposition-controlled state of Punjab repeatedly blocked the legislative project. “Will we continue to be a parliamentary democracy?”
In Tamil Nadu, officials said they were struggling to extend a metro line in the capital Chennai because Mr Modi’s administration was dragging its feet on New Delhi’s share of funding.
In Kerala, on India’s southwest coast, the state government is suing the Modi administration over what it says are arbitrary borrowing limits that have thrown the state budget into disarray and delayed payments.
In the western state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, Mr Modi’s officials have split the state’s two largest parties through a combination of pressure from investigative agencies and the offering of incentives. Such “smash and grab” politics, as critics have termed it, has paved the way for the BJP to emerge as kingmaker in a coalition government.
In the capital region of Delhi, the BJP seems hell-bent on destroying a smaller party that came to power promising to improve basic services. The state’s elected government has been stripped of important powers and federal agencies have mired top Aam Aadmi Party leaders in corruption cases.
The party’s deputy leader and a key cabinet minister have been in jail for more than a year. On Thursday, in a dramatic overnight raid, government agents arrested Arvind Kejriwal, the party leader and Delhi chief minister, on charges of financial crimes. He is the first sitting prime minister to be arrested.
Delhi’s bitter political strife is evident in overflowing sewage in parts of the city and long queues outside government hospitals.
Aam Aadmi has tried to improve hospitals in part by relying on external contractors to enter patient data. But the plan has been caught in the crossfire between Mr. Modi’s officials and the state’s elected government, and contractors have pulled staff from several hospitals after salaries were delayed for months.
“In their political battle, it’s the public that suffers,” said Adit Kumar, a cloth seller suffering from diabetes who, along with his wife, waited outside a crowded hospital in New Delhi on a recent day.
Saurabh Bhardwaj, an Aam Aadmi official in Delhi, said Mr Modi’s intention was clear: to push the country towards one-party rule.
“You have reduced the work of the state government so much that people are starting to say that it is better to bring the BJP and only they can deliver,” Mr Bhardwaj said. “This means that the federal structure will collapse.”
The federal-state’s biggest rift pits the more prosperous south against Mr Modi’s support base in the north.
Except for a brief period in Karnataka state, when the BJP took control by orchestrating autonomies, the party failed to win power in the five southern states.
Officials there say Mr. Modi is trying to rein them in for refusing to buy into his politics, including his party’s stirring of Hindu-Muslim tensions and his push to make Hindi — which is not widely spoken in south— a national language.
Resentment is fueled by complaints that the south gets proportionately less in return for the tax money it sends to New Delhi. Because the northern states have a large population and are far behind in basic development, they get a larger share of the revenue.
There are also serious concerns in the South that redistributing seats once a long-delayed national census is finally conducted will punish the South for its success in lowering the birth rate, key to its relative prosperity.
With its past investments in infrastructure, education and public health – the result of a unique mix of political, cultural and historical differences in the south – the region is better placed to advance India’s ambition for high-quality industrial production. Mr. Modi’s political approach, his opponents say, could undermine his ambitions to build India into a major economic power.
Federal Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman dismissed claims that the revenue was being distributed unfairly, saying the central government “releases and releases on time”, the states’ share.
“We want every part of the country to prosper,” Mr Modi told parliament after state leaders protested in New Delhi, casting himself as a strong supporter of “competitive, cooperative federalism”.
By pressuring state governments, analysts say, Mr Modi is simply exploiting structural flaws in India’s constitution, which created a republic – a quasi-federal union of states – after the British left in 1947.
The Indian National Congress, which ruled India undisputedly in the first decades after independence, abused the broad constitutional powers given to the central government over fiscal matters to thwart the rise of rivals.
From the late 1980s, however, the decline of the Congress ushered in an era of political coalitions, with regional parties finding representation in New Delhi.
This was also the period when India opened its heavily centralized economy to the free market. As development ensued, resource allocation came under greater pressure and pull between the central and state governments.
“The rise of regional powers made the center commit to certain principles,” said Kalaiyarasan A., an assistant professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. “The 1990s was a golden age of federalism.”
Today, Mr. Modi is seeking to remake Indian federalism with his “dual engine” push.
In opposition-controlled states, Mr. Modi has offered infrastructure and welfare projects, in his or his office’s name, to emerge as India’s sole driver of growth and development.
In participating in joint projects, state parties face a political cost: They will only get the money if they agree to the Modi brand.
And if they resist?
In 2022, Ms. Sitharaman, the finance minister, stopped at a shop in the southern state of Telangana that was distributing rice rations as part of a joint program in which the central government provided most of the funding. Mr. Modi’s image was not displayed there. Ms. Sitharaman attacked government officials.
“This is the work our Prime Minister is doing for his people,” Ms. Sitharaman said. “Our people will come and install the photo of the prime minister and you, as the district commander, will see to it that it is not removed, not torn, not affected.”
