by GARGA CHATTERJEE
In the wake of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre controversy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written to the chief ministers that ‘in forming the NCTC, it is not the government’s intent to affect the basic features of the constitutional provisions and allocation of powers between the states and the Union’.
But it is the wording of the proposed legislation that matters. The proviso provided in the draft legislation flies in the face of the pious banalities about the Centre’s intent and attitude towards the federal nature of the Constitution. It spells out clearly that the police/enforcers under the NCTC can arrest a person from any state, without informing or consulting the state police. Draconian and Gestapo-like, to say the least. There is another problem: law and order is a state subject. In the long process post-independence where the provinces were reduced to impoverished alms-seekers, this legislation goes for the jugular. This is serious stuff from a section of the Congress.
The Constitution reads, ‘India, that is Bharat, is a union of states.’ Without the states uniting to form a federal system, there is no India. All the power and legality that the Union government wields stem from this act. The same goes for its hubris when it dictates as Rex Imperator to the states through its non-statutory, non-elected appendages like the planning commission. The Sarkaria Commission of 1983 had a large set of specific recommendations to review Centre-state relationships and power sharing in the spirit of a federal union.
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