Indian Federalism: Party System, Ideology and Leadership Interplay

Although federal architecture constitutes the basic structure of governance in India, but as far as the spirit of a federation is concerned, it has remained confined to some underdeveloped political administrative structures only. Missing from the main document of Indian constitution, the term ‘federalism’ finds its mention as a basic feature of Indian political system only in S.R. Bommai versus Union of India case in 1994. Is it a sharing of power between centres and states only or other than that? This needs to go through the very idea of federation, standing on Indian socio-political grounds. By going through the debates in constitutional assembly on federalism, history of the demand for regional autonomy and the current discourse on it, specifically in the post-GST and post-370 period, it seems that India is still in a logical search for explaining its federal character. Ideological character of Indian party politics combined with identity factor, and state’s uncalled dependence on private sector amidst imbalanced resource distribution and the pulls and pushes of globalization, has made this explanation quite complex for Indian state. There is discord in terms of federal approach in political sphere on the one side and economic arena on the other. Because of this discord, it appears that where on the one hand the tendencies of centralization are on rise, processes of decentralization are also growing simultaneously, wherein the diverse popular identities find their expression. However, the extent of their space in the majoritarian influence, certainly invites certain questions. A quest for cooperative and competitive federalism is nothing but the causational reflection of this discord. Apart from this, the discourse on Indian federalism often gets entangled in its ‘symmetric’ and ‘asymmetric’ nature, here the question is -does asymmetry forms the basic spirit of Indian federalism, if not ignoring the foundational processes of coming up of India, as a nation state, on international plane.