Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest just before the Lok Sabha elections will be seen as an attack on democracy, which it is without doubt. It is also of a piece with the BJP’s distrust of federalism. Down the years, but especially after the linguistic states were formed, the party wanted federalism and the entire edifice of states in India to be abandoned in favour of a single legislature and, given that we were in a parliamentary system, a single leader.

M.S. Golwalkar, the then head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, wrote an essay in 1956, that is reproduced in his book Bunch of Thoughts. He writes: “Then came our present Constitution converting our country into a number of almost distinct units each with a ‘state’ of its own and all ‘federated’ into one ‘Union’… When one pauses to think of the conditions in which the makers of this Constitution lived when they framed this Constitution, one sees that the atmosphere then was extremely congenial to the formation and evolution of a unitary state – One Country, One Legislature, One Executive Centre running the administration throughout the country – an expression of one homogeneous solid nation in Bharat or what remained of it then. But the mind and reason of the leaders were conditioned by the obsession of a ’federation of states’ where each linguistic........

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