Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

Volume 74, No. 4

 

Towards a More Federalized Parliamentary System in India: Explaining Functional Change
By Mahendra P. Singh

 

Abstract

A federal society and culture historically, India gradually moved towards an administrative federalist response during the British Raj and a "quasi-federal" (K.C. Wheare) or "parliamentary federal" (R.L. Watts) polity under the 1950 Constitution. The predominantly parliamentary tenor of politics in India has, in the1990s, become considerably more federalized than in the past. The federal features of the political system are manifested in the sharp rise of state autonomy movements in the 1980s and the signing of a number of ethnic accords with them by the Centre, as well as a new behavioural pattern in central and federally relevant institutions of government from the 1990s onwards.

The impact of social and political mobilization on the Indian federal system has been intermediated by a transformed party system from one-party dominance to a multipartisan configuration since 1989 and an activist judiciary that extended its power of judicial review to areas where parliamentary/executive supremacy was the norm, e.g., central takeover of a state government under the emergency provisions of the Constitution. This transformed institutional scenario has activated a series of points of autonomy of federal relevance envisaged by the first Constitutional Commission on Centre-State Relations, appointed in 1983. Even without the formal implementation of most of the recommendations of the Sarkaria Commission Report (1987-88), it has become self-implementing. The federalization process has also brought about some changes in tune with neo-liberal economic reforms in the patterns of fiscal federal relations.