In a memorable passage in Federalist No. 51 (1788), James Madison articulated the eternal dilemma of governance:
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
The liberty argument for decentralisation begins here. Sovereignty resides in the people. The Constitution is the deed of trust by which the people delegate limited authority to agents who govern on their behalf. Tyranny arises not merely from the malice of rulers but from the structural concentration of this delegated power in a single set of hands.
Montesquieu anticipated this danger in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Constant experience, he wrote, shows that “every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.” To prevent this abuse, “power should be a check to power.”
The danger is systemic, not personal; the safeguard must be structural, not moral. Constitutional democracies, therefore, disperse authority along two axes. The horizontal axis separates legislative, executive, and judicial powers, preventing the fusion of lawmaking, execution, and adjudication.
The vertical axis — federalism — divides authority between the Union and the States, and in mature systems, further down to local governments. Power is thus divided not once but twice. Madison wrote: “The different governments will control each other at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.”
Even Alexander Hamilton, often portrayed as a centralist, recognised the liberty-preserving value of intergovernmental rivalry. In Federalist No. 28 (1787), he observed that “power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government.” Citizens, he added, retain the ultimate safeguard of balance “by throwing themselves into either scale.” Liberty rests not on the benevolence of rulers but on a plural architecture of contesting institutions in which no authority is left without a counterweight.
Alexis de Tocqueville extended this reasoning to local institutions. In Democracy in America (1835–40), he wrote:
“Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.”
In local institutions, the people exercise influence more directly than at any other level. Decentralisation cultivates habits of participation and responsibility without which liberty becomes abstract.
Twentieth-century history offered grim confirmation. Highly centralised regimes — most notably Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — descended into totalitarianism in part because they lacked constitutionally entrenched sub-national power centres capable of organised resistance.
Post-war Germany drew this lesson explicitly. The Grundgesetz (1949) embedded a robust federal order: the Länder retained substantial legislative and executive authority, and the Bundesrat gave them an effective veto over national legislation. In Germany, federalism functions as a constitutional security architecture against central domination.
The framers of the Constitution recognised the liberty-preserving logic of divided power. Judicial doctrines culminating in SR Bommai v. Union of India (1994) affirm that federalism is part of the Basic Structure, thereby granting states an independent constitutional existence. Yet the constitutional text also exhibits a pronounced unitary bias. Provisions such as Article 3 (which allows Parliament to alter State boundaries without consent), Article 250 (Union legislative competence during emergencies), Article 257 (Union control over State executive action), Article 365 (imposition of President’s Rule for non-compliance with Union directions), and the Emergency Provisions (Articles 352–360) collectively reflect elements of over-centralisation weakening liberty-preserving logic of divided power in practice.
Local governance reflects similar ambivalence. Beyond Article 40’s non-justiciable directive on panchayats and the inclusion of “Local Government” in the State List, the original Constitution provided little constitutional status to the third tier. The 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) sought to remedy this deficit, but panchayats and municipalities often function more as implementing agencies for higher governments than as genuine institutions of self-rule.
To conclude, decentralisation is a constitutional safeguard of liberty. By dispersing authority across Union, State, and local institutions — through a polycentric system of overlapping, independent centres — it keeps power divided, supervised, and corrigible, ensuring that sovereignty remains with the People, not merely in theory, but in the lived practice of self-government.
To be concluded