At a high time when the entire BJP mechanism, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the groundlevel cadres, are throttling up the impending inauguration ceremony of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh as a religious galore across the nation, a grim revelation has come as a blitzkrieg to the central administration and to the Modi rhetoric that has been claiming to be transparent and to exercise an unbiased approach when it comes to allocate the funds from central taxes to the states. 

In the albeit of an apparent display of funding discrimination to several states particularly to the non-BJP ruling states, the Modi regime has been disseminating a campaign that it has been properly releasing the funds from the central taxes to the state governments as per the recommendations of the Financial Commission. Recently, the DMK ruling Tamil Nadu government clashed with the Modi regime for not allocating the demanded fund for the state when it was strongly hit by natural disaster.

The Modi government has also been accused of releasing a less share of fund to the states like Tamil Nadu that pay high taxes from the GST bracket and disturbing more funds to some northern states like Uttar Pradesh. At the outset, the Modi regime is seen as a miser when it comes to allocating funds to the states and this grim revelation has exposed that this sort of 'miser approach' from the BJP was perhaps in the making when the party was coming close to the power a decade ago and that it still keeps this approach intact amidst the fact that the party is approaching a crucial general election. 

According to this grim revelation, that was exposed by The Reporters' Collective and was published in Al Jazeera, Narendra Modi had secretly tried to cut state funds at an enormous scale. He had carried out this secret masterplan to discriminate the states immediately after becoming the Prime Minister in 2014. Just a year ago, in 2013, when Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, he staunchly demanded the then Congress-led UPA government in the centre to give states a 50 per cent share of the central taxes.

Nevertheless, within a year, Modi made a big U-turn after coming to power where he immediately tried to massively slash central funds to the state governments. It has been exposed that after becoming the Prime Minister, Modi had held backdoor negotiations with the Finance Commission of India to significantly cut funds allocated to the states. In a way, his secret masterplan aimed to breach the constitutional provisiosn where the government has no power to debate or negotiate with the Finance Commission, formally or informally. 

Despite this, Modi went on to curate his mission, only to face fiasco as the Commission was said to have given no room to his plans to cut off the allocations to the states. Modi had eventually backed off from his attempt. While he was unhappy over the Commission's firm stand, he went on to put a false claim in the Parliament that he had welcomed the Finance Commission's recommendations on the tax portions to be allocated to the states. 

According to the report published by Al Jazeera, the Finance Commission's firm stance on not to accept Modi's plan had forced the Modi government to hastily redo its full budget in 48 hours and slash funding across welfare programmes since its assumption of retaining a greater portion of the central taxes didn't get accomplished. This back-door drama has been brought to light by BVR Subrahmanyam, who is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the government think-tank NITI Aayog, which Modi commissioned after scrapping the Central Planning Commission after coming to power. 

Subrahmanyam was a joint secretary in the Prime Minister's office and he was the liaison in the backdoor negotiations between Narendra Modi and the chairman of the Finance Commission, YV Reddy. Interestingly, this is the first time that a top official in the Modi government had divulged the shocking attempts made by the Prime Minister to break the protocol behind the screen while claiming to be transparent and unbiased before the cameras. 

As several states are raising concerns over the flawed approach of the Modi government in releasing funds to them, this revelation has put weight behind such concerns that the centre is really biased towards its state funds. Subrahmanyam had made this revelation while speaking as a panelist at a seminar on financial reporting in India, which had been organised last year by the non-governmental think-tank, the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP). 

While speaking in the event, Subrahmanyam further revealed how the federal budgets are covered in layers and layers of attempt to cover the truth and added that he was sure that the US-based short seller Hindenburg Research will open up the Indian government's accounts if they are transparent. This Hindenburg Research became popular when it exposed the corporate frauds that were committed by the Adani Group of Companies, led by Gautam Adani, the richest man in India who is close to the Prime Minister.

India's Finance Commission is an independent body that is made up of economists and public finance experts and is into deciding the percentage of money that the union government should share with the states from its tax collections. The term of the Commission runs for five years and the 14th Finance Commission was formed in 2013 during which Narendra Modi was serving as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. During that time, he demanded the then Congress government to give states a fifty per cent share of central taxes. 

The Finance Commission, in its report submitted in December 2014, after Modi came to power, has recommended that states should get 42 per cent of the share of central taxes from 32 per cent they had been receiving until then. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Union Finance Ministry wished to keep the states' share of taxes down at 33 per cent with the view of reserving a larger portion of the fund to the union government. 

To execute their wish, Prime Minister Modi began negotiating with Finance Commission's chairman YV Reddy through NITI Aayog's chief Subrahmanyam despite knowing that negotiating with the Commission is against the constitutional provisions as the government has only two options - accept the recommendations made by the Commission or veto them and form a new Commission. Modi played out an off-record drama to get YV Reddy to accept his negotiation of limiting the share of states. 

Subrahmanyam said he was the only other person in that conversation between Modi and YV Reddy, who was earlier the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. During the panel discussion with CSEP, Subrahmanyam said, "No Finance Ministry was involved. Should it be 42 per cent or 32 or some number in between? The previous number was 32 and the conversation had lasted two hours during which Reddy was firm that the share of the state funds from the centre can't be decreased. 

Subrahmanyam recalled Reddy, telling him, "Go and tell your boss (the Prime Minister) that he has no choice." Finally, the government had to accept the Finance Commission's recommendations of 42 per cent. However, Narendra Modi, who was elected by people, had concealed his government's failed attempt to reduce the states' share of revenues to the Parliament and put a blame on the Commission, in an apparent jibe for not abiding by his recommendations.

On February 27, 2015, Narendra Modi told the Parliament that there was a dispute among the Finance Commission and maintained his rhetoric that his government's commitment is to enrich and strengthen the states. Modi said, "To strengthen the nation, we have to strengthen the states. There is a dispute among Finance Commission members. We could have taken advantage of that. We didn't. But it is our commitment that states should be enriched, should be strengthened. We gave them 42 per cent devolution." 

While claiming to strengthen the states, Modi made teasing remarks against the states in his speech. He said, "Some states would not have treasuries big enough to keep all this money." BJP MPs laughed and lauded Modi's remark. It was said that the Modi government was preparing to table its maiden budget with 33 per cent share of funds to the states, but as the Finance Commission was against the move, the budget was swiftly revamped in 48 hours. 

Subrahmanyam said, "The budget was written in two days that year. Two days because this recommendation is accepted so late, so late and everything was written at that time in a conference room in NITI Aayog. Four of us sat and actually recast the entire budget." With 42 per cent allocation of funds for the state governments, the Modi regime went on to slash allocations for several welfare schemes including the schemes that were benefitting women and children. 

Furthermore, Subrahmanyam has also revealed a case of financial misconduct in the infrastructure project in Jammu & Kashmir, when the state was under the direct control of the Modi regime after the abrogation of its special status. By terming the event as a 'funny case', Subrahmanyam divulged that the Jammu & Kashmir administration, under the BJP control, had submitted "fake UC" (Utilisation Certificate). This UC is an official document certifying that funds have been used for the purpose for which they were allocated. 

Despite in the wake of what have become whistleblowing admissions, the seminar's YouTube livestream has received around 500 views and when The Reporters' Collective sent queries to the Prime Minister's Office, what happened next was the video of the seminar was cut off on the CSEP YouTube channel. However, the wrongdoing of Modi's government has come to light and the revelations from Subrahmanyam have given a big blow to Modi's repeated claims of transparency. 

Though Narendra Modi is enormously popular, his contentious 'Hindutva model' governance has been ripping apart the democratic values that India aims to nurture. Subrahmanyam's revelations have also sparked a notion whether the Modi administration has been exercising this cut-funds-for-state approach for a decade as several non-BJP ruling states have been regularly clashing with the Modi regime over the biased allocation of funds and over delayed disburse of their shares in GST. 

When Modi and his BJP loyalists are gearing up for the inauguration of Ram Temple in Ayodhya on January 22, these revelations have displayed the sequel of an authoritarian regime and how the rights of the states are at stake under it. Notably, it is not the first time that Modi is facing allegations of transparency. The funding channel that he established during the COVID pandemic in the name of 'PM Cares' has been under public scrutiny for long time for being opaque as this fund channel can neither be audited by the central auditing agency nor the Indian citizens can know about it under the Right to Information Act (RTI).