In the mid-1980s, when I was teaching at the University of Hyderabad, I invited the then finance minister of West Bengal, Dr Ashok Mitra, to deliver a lecture on centre-state financial relations. Dr Mitra had, by then, become an important spokesperson of fiscal federalism. It was also the time when the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and N.T. Rama Rao’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP) were virtual allies. NTR had coined the phrase “the centre is a conceptual myth” demanding more powers for state governments.
A day before Dr Mitra’s arrival in. . .