Abstract Designating India as a ‘Union of States’ under Article 1, the Constitution of India does not adhere to a federal vocabulary. The perusal of the Constituent Assembly Debates establishes this verbiage to be a deliberate choice. Scholars such as Prof. Wheare (1963) have classified the Indian Federalism as ‘quasi-federal’, which remains a part of constitutional vocabulary to date. This scholarship undertakes an assessment of federal semantics and taxonomical choices under the Constitutions of the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Brazil and Canada, juxtaposing them with the ‘quasi-federal’ model of the Indian Constitution. Challenging rigid categorizations, the paper argues that the constitutions identified as ‘federal’ have also depicted centralizing tendencies in their working. Examining the legal and political intent behind the omission of ‘federal’ and its anti-federal fallouts, the scholarship explores that the lack of a uniform federal vocabulary and mis-categorization has allowed the Union government and the judiciary to reinforce the centralization of power that shapes the federal discourse, while sporadically identifying the federal features in the Indian Constitution.
Nidhi Sharma (Wed,) studied this question.
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