Tussle between Central vs Union Government

Tussle between Central vs Union Government

Subject : Polity

Context : Recently, a controversy erupted over the new DMK government referring to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the ‘union government’ instead of ‘central government’.

Concept :

Central v/s Union Government

• Justice (retd) K Chandru had pointed out that more than 70 years after Independence, there is no authorised Tamil translation of the Constitution of India.
• The question in the ‘union or centre’ debate is about the nature of the Indian state.
• In the Government of India Act, 1935, provinces had more power and the Viceroy had only the minimum but the Indian constitution changed this equation, and the federal government was made more powerful.
• The actual power is vested with the Union of India in all respects.
• The Tamil Nadu government stated that the Constitution describes India as a “Union of States” and therefore the ideal reference to the Centre would be the “Union Government”.

Constitutional Provisions for Central or Union Government

• Article 1(1) of the Constitution of India says that India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.
• The chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution had used the world ‘Union’ because:
• The Indian federation was not the result of an agreement by the units; and
• The component units had no freedom to secede from the federation.
• The Indian Constitution constantly uses the word “Union” to describe the entire country as well as the government that administers it.
• Article 53 reads that the executive power of the Union shall be vested in the President.
• The ‘Central government’ is a term not used in the original Constitution as passed by the Constituent Assembly.
• The Preamble clearly demonstrates the federal form, spirit and content of the Indian Constitution with an open acknowledgement of the centralizing tendencies and the quasi-federal characteristics in the actual working of the Constitution.
• The seventh schedule (Article-246) of the Constitution contains the Union List with 97 items, State List with 66 items and Concurrent List with 47 items.

Reasons for use of Central or Union Government

• The British Parliament passed the Regulating Act, appointing a governor general to oversee all of British India.
• The administration that the governor general ran was often described as the “Central Government” in order to differentiate it from the “provincial governments”.
• The Government of India Act 1919 introduced a rudimentary form of self-government and federalism in India and the powers were split between “central” and “provincial” subjects.
• The Government of India Act 1935 proposed a merger between British India and the princely states that the term “Federation of India” was first used.
• The modern term “Union” was first officially used in 1946 by the Cabinet Mission Plan.