Book review: Mahendra Prasad Singh, Federalism in India
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00195561231166363 |
| Author | Prabhat Kumar Datta,Durga P. Chhetri |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
716Book Reviews
Mahendra Prasad Singh, Federalism in India, New Delhi: Sage
Publication, 2022, pp., xxi + 294, `1,295.00.
DOI: 10.1177/00195561231166363
Recent global pandemic and political events in various parts of the world have
attracted new attention to the strengths and weaknesses of federal solutions as a
means of addressing political problems. One of the important features of federal-
ism as a democratic theory is its ability to protect against the potential tyranny of
a majority. For William Riker, this was one of its main attractions. Another major
factor in the surge of interest in federalism is that the world is paradoxically
exhibiting simultaneously increasing pressures for integration as well as disinte-
gration. In other words, federalism has been enjoying a global renaissance and
Daniel Elazar describes this phenomenon as a ‘worldwide federalist revolution’.
Federalism, therefore, has become a shibboleth of political reformers in the early
21st Century.
There has been considerable scholarly literature attempting to reassess the nature
of federalism and to understand such issues as the theory and practice of federalism.
Out of 193 countries, over 50 politically sovereign states are either federations
or included within the forms of self-determination and self-government. Over 40 per cent
of the world’s population lives under federal or quasi-federal constitutions/govern-
ments (p. 3). Among others, a modest example is the ‘Austrian Convention’ which
was launched in 2003 to renew the Austrian federation. Contrary to the arguments
made by a scholar like Harold Laski, neither big centralised government nor the
welfare state has made federalism obsolete. Federalism is widely viewed as a sensi-
ble choice of a polity both for established and emerging democracies.
Indian federalism is a more recent phenomenon. Apart from the 1950
Constitution, thinkers and scholars on Indian federalism cannot point to such a
foundational and approachable text as the American Federalist Papers. India’s
Constituent Assembly deliberately adopted a centralised Constitution in the after-
math of the Partition and Independence. In other words, India purposefully
adopted what Ivor Jennings called ‘a federation with strong centralising tenden-
cies’. With its ambiguous mix of weak federalist and strong centralist elements,
the Indian constitutional architecture has been subject to conicting interpreta-
tions and claims from its very beginning. Seen from an international perspective,
the Indian case is to be located at the edge of the comparative matrix of federal
systems. Unlike the United States and Switzerland, India has no history of sover-
eign States coming together of their own free will to form a federation. Following
Alfred Stepan, it is best to call India a ‘holding together’ federation, not a ‘coming
together’ federation (except in case of princely states).
Indian federalism has undergone enormous changes during the last seventy-
ve years. The transformation has been so extensive as to warrant a re-examination
of the working of the federal system in India. The monograph under review, to
borrow the phrases from the author himself is a ‘comprehensive neo-institutional
analysis of the Indian federal system in a comparative perspective’ (p. xv). This
conceptual tool is useful in capturing the wide and complex array of contexts
including the global one and analysing them in a proper perspective without
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