Part I — Federalism or Fealty?
There is something unsettling about Mark Medoff’s story – Children of a Lesser God. It is ostensibly about Sarah Norman, a deaf woman, and James Leeds, the hearing teacher who falls in love with her. But underneath the romance is a more difficult struggle: who gets to decide what is good for the other? James believes he can bring Sarah into his world of speech and sound. Sarah’s problem is not that she has no voice. It is that people have spent a lifetime assuming that because she cannot hear, somebody else must speak for her.
Perhaps that is why the story kept returning to my mind while observing the new relationship between Bhubaneswar and New Delhi unfold.
In 2024, Odisha gave the BJP an extraordinary mandate: 20 of its 21 Lok Sabha seats and 78 of 147
Assembly seats. For the first time in a generation, the same political party governed Bhubaneswar and
Delhi. The sales pitch had a neat mechanical metaphor: double engine. Two governments, one political
party, fewer obstacles, faster decisions and, presumably, faster development.
It sounded logical. But there is another question about engines which is slightly less convenient: who
decides where the train is going?
The Constitution does not describe India as a senior government and a junior government. It divides
legislative powers between the Union and the states, and the 73rd and 74th Amendments created
constitutional space for local self-government. Federalism was not designed to disappear whenever
the same party wins elections at two levels. If anything, political alignment should make cooperative
federalism easier while leaving the state with the confidence to disagree.
That is where the story becomes interesting.
There is an older economic question lurking underneath it, one that existed long before the Republic:
what happens when a resource-rich region produces minerals, water, energy, land and labour, while
many of the decisions about their use and value are made elsewhere? Colonialism had a particularly
efficient answer—extract the valuable stuff, move the higher-value activity elsewhere and return
enough to keep the arrangement functioning.
Modern India is obviously not British India. But the question survives the empire: who extracts, who
decides, who captures the value and who bears the cost?
Odisha’s minerals bring that question into sharp focus. Parliament passed the MMDR Amendment in
August, restricting states from imposing certain taxes, cesses and similar levies on mineral rights and
mineral-bearing land. The Centre argues that uneven state levies fragment the national market and
make Indian minerals less competitive; the Ministry of Mines says around 90 per cent of mining taxes
and statutory payments will continue to accrue to states. Odisha’s opposition, however, argues that
the amendment weakens the state’s fiscal autonomy. The dispute is particularly significant because
the Supreme Court had, in 2024, upheld the power of states to tax mineral rights and mineral-bearing
land.
So the question is not whether Delhi is loading Odisha’s iron ore onto trains and taking it away. It is
more subtle: who gets to determine how much economic value Odisha’s natural wealth should
generate for Odisha?
The Mahanadi asks almost the same question in liquid form.
For eight years, the river dispute between Odisha and Chhattisgarh has travelled through tribunals,
technical committees and meetings. The latest effort is to return to negotiations, with the Centre’s
water institutions facilitating the process. N.R. Mohanty’s recent account in The Wire notes the
extraordinary irony: the tribunal itself has repeatedly suggested dialogue, yet years have passed
without a substantive resolution. Now, with both states under BJP governments, the possibility of an
“amicable settlement” has returned.
A handshake between two chief ministers with a Union minister standing in between them for the
Sona River water arrangement makes a lovely photograph. Politics does like photographs. Rivers are
less cooperative.
And in the context of Odisha and Chhattisgarh, if an agreement is attained, it may well be a political
achievement and the photograph will tell us very little. The real questions will be: how much water
does Odisha receive, what happens upstream, what happens to Hirakud, what happens to agriculture
and industry, and who bears the ecological cost? An agreement is not necessarily a victory simply
because both sides sign it. The real test is what was agreed and at whose cost.
And then there is Rice.
On September 4, Odisha’s Food Supplies Minister Krushna Chandra Patra complained that the Food
Corporation of India was not lifting rice from the state according to the targets it had fixed. Odisha, he
said, was spending around ₹30,000 crore on paddy procurement and trying to pay farmers within 48
hours. But if the rice already procured is not lifted, storage fills up and fresh paddy procurement
becomes difficult. “Our hands are getting tied,” he said, adding that Odisha had sent 20 members to
the Lok Sabha and deserved the right to place its demands before the Centre.
There is almost a little political comedy hidden here. The government in Bhubaneswar is BJP. The government in Delhi is BJP. Twenty of Odisha’s 21 Lok Sabha MPs are BJP. And the state is asking Delhi to please take the rice.
Because that is the larger question behind the double-engine promise. Has political alignment given
Odisha greater bargaining power, or has it made the state more accommodating?
This is also where the colonial economic question returns—not as an accusation that Delhi is behaving
like the British, but as a warning about dependency. Is Odisha becoming merely a convenient location
for other people’s capital, decisions and priorities? Or is it building the institutions and capacities that
allow it to retain more value—universities, research, public health, urban transport, technology,
industrial value chains and knowledge?
The double-engine promise was supposed to be about more than photographs. It was supposed to
give Odisha greater leverage. Two years on, perhaps we should ask whether it has.
And perhaps this is where Sarah’s story quietly returns. James did not begin as Sarah’s enemy. He
believed he was helping her. His mistake was subtler: he assumed that because he could hear, he
knew the world better; because he spoke the dominant language, that language should define the
relationship.
Odisha is not Sarah. Delhi is not James. The analogy should not be stretched that far. But the question remains.
A state does not become stronger merely because a more powerful government is kind to it. Nor does federalism mean that Delhi must agree with Bhubaneswar on everything. A healthy Union–state relationship requires something much more ordinary and much harder: two governments able to disagree without one becoming afraid to speak. Perhaps that is what the people of Odisha were promised in 2024—not merely benefits flowing from Delhi, but a stronger voice in Delhi. And this is where the title begins to mean something beyond the film.
Children of a Lesser God is not really a question about deafness. It is a question about dignity: why
should anyone have to prove that their voice deserves to be heard? Odisha has given the Union
minerals, power, labour, land, water and food. It has given the ruling party an extraordinary political
mandate. Twenty MPs are now in Delhi carrying, at least in principle, the voices of the people who
sent them there.
So perhaps the question is not whether Odisha has received enough. Perhaps it is whether Odisha is
speaking and being heard enough.
The answer may lie not in Delhi alone, but in those twenty voices sitting there…Alas! Sarah!