Ch 7Federalism — Class 11 Political Science, concept-first.

Two political maps of India -- one from 1947, one from the present day -- look strikingly different from each other.

India is a country of enormous scale and diversity -- home to more than twenty major languages and several hundred smaller ones, multiple major religions, and millions of people belonging to indigenou…

Even before independence, the leaders of India's national movement recognised that governing a country as large as India would require dividing power between the provinces and the central government.

The Indian Constitution creates two distinct sets of government: one for the entire nation, called the Union (or central) government, and one for each individual unit, called the State government.

It is widely accepted that although India is a federation, the Constitution has deliberately created a strong central government.

The Constitution gives the central government considerable strength, but it also recognises that every state has its own distinct identity.

The Constitution only lays down a framework; how centre-state relations actually work out in practice depends heavily on the shifting political situation.

Different states and different political parties have, at various points, demanded greater autonomy from the central government -- though what "autonomy" actually means has varied from one state or pa…

The office of the Governor has long been a source of tension between the states and the central government.

The demand to carve out new states has been the other major source of tension within India's federal system.

Alongside their disputes with the centre over autonomy and the sharing of resources, Indian states have also had many disputes with one another -- sometimes between two neighbouring states, sometimes…

One of the most unusual features of India's federal arrangement is that not every state is treated identically by the Constitution -- several states receive differential treatment.

Jammu and Kashmir was, for a long period, the other major example of a state with a special constitutional status, governed under Article 370.

As the textbook puts it, federalism is like a rainbow, where each colour stays separate and yet together they form one harmonious pattern.