Indian Federalism and its Challenges

Abstract

Unlike the classical federation India is a unique federation with a considerable amount of centralizing tendencies. The present paper tries to highlight the major challenges India is facing to maintain the features of a federation. Indian federalism is not an outcome of a treaty or an agreement like the US. The Britishers left India as a state marred by multiple problems. The major challenge in front of the Indian leaders was to build a framework or system that could help in administering and governing the whole territory. For the administrative convenience it was necessary to reorganize Indian states. The vision of the Indian leaders was to organize states on administrative and economic basis. But linguistic affinity of the people of India and lingual movement compelled the leaders to base the reorganization on the basis of language. Regionalism and separatism played a major role in creating adverse conditions for federalism to grow in India. Another major challenge was to tackle the centre-state relations in later years with the emergence of regional parties. In the initial years India did not face problems with centre-state relations because the same party was ruling at both centre and the states. Rise of regional parties ignited regional aspirations of the leaders as well as the people, which started hurting the federal spirit of the country. Role of governors became the focal point with the use of Article 356 on the frequent basis in the states run by opposition parties.