Pondicherry, Karaikkal, Mahe, and Yanam were under French colonial rule until 1954. In 1963, the four units, united into the union territory of Pondicherry (renamed Puducherry in 2006), were accorded a legislative assembly and a council of ministers, which was entrusted to "aid and advise the Administrator (Lieutenant Governor) in the exercise of his functions." This basic governance structure continues to this day.
The formation of Pondicherry as a union territory stood as the antithesis of a parallel logic of national integration. Pondicherry and Karaikkal were enclosed within Tamil Nadu, Mahe within Kerala, and Yanam in Andhra Pradesh. Each had (and has) linguistic and cultural affinity with their adjoining states than with each other. Following agitations by linguistic groups in the 1950s and 60s, India began reorganising states along the lines of "linguistic and cultural affinity". Since then, substantially autonomous states drawn along linguistic and cultural lines have formed the defining feature of federalism in India.
Puducherry is enormously dependent on central financial grants. This has given rise to a class of self-serving politicians which begets the patrimony of the union government.
The States Reorganisation Commission's report of 1955 saw Pondicherry's status as a "transitional and flexible arrangement for the present.”. Yet, this status was cemented. Over the years, the dual problems of lack of autonomy and crisis of a defined head of state are significantly affecting the lives of people and their democratic possibilities.
Local politics
The inheritance of colonial political geography posed a significant challenge to integrating the four offshoot regions of Puducherry. Over the years, it has become evident that the task has failed. Puducherry – the administrative capital – has always mimicked the political culture of Tamil Nadu, and the outer regions of Karaikkal, Yanam, and Mahe have consistently been excluded from the political arithmetic of Puducherry UT. Jinos Basheer, a member of CPI(M) from Mahe speaks of the neglect of Mahe: “Distance [from Puducherry] and language [barrier] is the key to the neglect of Mahe. For Puducherry, Mahe [residents] are second-class citizens. Several projects in the past two decades have been discontinued due to non-availability of funds, and for the past three budgets, we have received nothing but government salaries."
Puducherry has greater democratic powers than other union territories. It is one of only two with a legislature, which is more empowered than that of Delhi, the other. Yet, the legislature and the elected executive wield limited political authority. Puducherry is enormously dependent on central financial grants. This has given rise to a class of self-serving politicians which begets the patrimony of the union government. For most of the MLAs, their offices are a means to their business ends, with an overwhelming proportion of them crorepatis. MLAs effectively exercise their power by control and manipulation of institutions related to everyday issues such as pensions, trade licenses, or domicile certificates.
In Puducherry, legislators virtually stall the possibility of alternative democratic institutions, such as the local bodies.
The inclination of elected representatives or political parties to control and regulate people’s right to welfare is a dilemma common to many democracies. In Puducherry, legislators virtually stall the possibility of alternative democratic institutions, such as the local bodies. Puducherry has had only two terms of local bodies in the region in the past sixty years: one in 1973, after the formulation of the Pondicherry Municipal Act, and the other in 2006, after Madras High Court ordered the conduct of local body elections acting on a public interest litigation. After the term ended in 2010, to date, the local body elections have not been held, despite a 2021 ruling by the Supreme Court ordering the conduct of elections in Puducherry within six months. The legal battle has taken different routes since.
As Ashokan, one of the lawyers on whose litigation the Madras High Court ordered the 2006 election, says: “the political leaders in Puducherry do not want a new class and generation of leadership to emerge through the ranks of Municipal elections.”
Central meddling
Constitutional discourses around union territories have argued that it represents the ‘asymmetric federalism’ of India: a “weighted and differentiated equality” among administrative units within a quasi-federal state (Saxena 2021). Every union territory has its own distinct administrative structure and is coordinated by the union government in varying degrees. The reason to categorise each region as a union territory is also diverse. While Delhi is retained by the union owing to the special needs of a capital city, others are explained by their different colonial heritage, their peculiar geography or culture, or even national security. They also facilitate governance in small territories which have financial, cultural or geographical constraints.
Due to central control, union territories have often been a test-bed for neoliberal reforms. Puducherry is no exception.
With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manoeuvring with the federal structure of the country, union territories have come to hold a peculiar status, redefining their purpose and utility. In 2019, the union government notoriously dissected the state of Jammu and Kashmir into union territories; the first time a union territory was created out of a state. In 2021, the regional powers of the state government in Delhi were trimmed, thereby bringing the national capital even more under union control. More recently, Lakshadweep witnessed sweeping measures by the administrator that clearly violated local popular aspirations and raised concerns from civil society. In Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are native to vulnerable tribal communities, the union government have piloted a massive infrastructure project that requires extensive environmental clearances.
Puducherry has not been immune from these struggles. The limitations of its legislative and executive powers are well-defined in the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963. In real terms, the Lieutenant Governor (LG) reserves the right to withhold laws passed by the legislature and can ‘act in his discretion’ in decisions on legislative bills. The BJP-led union government has increasingly exploited this authority of the LG for nearly a decade. The reign of Kiran Bedi from 2016 to 2021 remains in popular memory as an instance of the brute power of the office of LG and protests against it.
With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manoeuvring with the federal structure of the country, union territories have come to hold a peculiar status, redefining their purpose and utility.
Due to central control, union territories have often been a test-bed for neoliberal reforms. Puducherry is no exception. It was one of the first to have mandated Aadhar en masse. In 2019, Bedi discontinued Public Distribution System (PDS) shops in Puducherry, aligning with the BJP's long-term objective of dismantling welfare provisions. In 2020 again, the union government announced that the National Digital Health Mission would be launched in six union territories, including Puducherry. The mission was rolled out to other states a year later. After Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman announced that, as a model to all states, electricity distribution companies would be privatised in all union territories, Puducherry notified the sale of 100% of their shares in the local distcom in 2022.
Concerns and the way forward
The local political leadership and the legislature in Puducherry have held statehood (or Special Category state, as recently demanded by Congress) as a solution to the administrative predicament in the region. Since the 1970s, successive legislative assemblies have passed resolutions for statehood. But lack of adequate sources for revenue generation and the dependency on central grants put the region under undue financial stress, which has grown in the past two decades into an endemic financial crisis.
It is preposterous that colonial heritage was persuasive over the looming factor of cultural heterogeneity or long distances between the four regions of Puducherry. The preservation of colonial heritage does not compel impeding of people’s democratic possibilities. The state of Goa, or the coastal town of Fort Kochi in Kerala, are examples where distinct colonial heritages are preserved within the bounds of the federal structure. There are ample reasons to suggest that the outer regions of Mahe, Yanam or Karaikkal are yet fringes of a political region, whose claim to the French Indian culture, in substance, is only evoked in their continued political bondage to Puducherry.
Aazam Abdul Nisthar is a native of Mahe and a student at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen, Germany. This article was written as part of the Smitu Kothari Fellowship at the Centre for Financial Accountability, Delhi. The writer would like to thank Sridhar V for his comments.
