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Beyond Quasi Federalism: Change and Continuity in Indian Federalism

Despite the centrality of the federal idea to both the organization and the conduct of Indian politics, it is surprising how poorly informed most public discussions in India are about federalism. At one end, we have a farcical denial of the federal character of India, because of the choice of the word union, ignoring the fact that federations are nothing else than unions of states. At the other end, we have political debates which increasingly swear by federalism, in its different shades—cooperative, competitive and even collaborative. We therefore ask ourselves, why is it that the public imagination of what federalism is, what purposes it serves and how it works is so far removed from the academic and scholarly discussions on the theme? And if we were to try to bridge these two worlds, where do we begin? The answer we believe lies in an innocuous but ubiquitous phrase ‘India is a quasi-federal country’. There is probably no other phrase that has dotted countless undergraduate and even master’s degree examination answer scripts year after year when asked to write on centre–state relations in India. In most undergraduate textbooks, quasi-federal is the only link the topic of federalism has with the scholarly world. We believe that if quasi-federal is the dominant idea that students take away from their courses on India’s political institutions, then the understanding deficit that echoes in public discussions, media commentaries, public speeches and policy documents is only to be expected. This quasi-federal fixation reflects the inadequate comprehension that prevails about the vast changes in the practice, processes and working of Indian federalism since the inauguration of the polity, when the phrase was first enunciated. It appears that many of our venerable textbooks and commentators are locked in a time warp, as our perception of federalism continues to be framed by an understanding of our federal institutions that has long given way to new realities. This further means that the variety of new ideas, perspectives and approaches in the realm of federal studies available in research monographs and peer-reviewed journals have not made their way into the classroom. The fact that public discussion continues to be framed in traditional juristic and constitutional terms, ignorant of the vast corpus of work about the theory and the practice of Indian federalism, is a reflection on a singular loss in transmission from scholarship to teaching.