India, as the world’s largest democracy, is facing a unique challenge in the twenty-first century in managing the relationship between democracy and federalism. This challenge is most pronounced in the recent debates on delimitation – redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies for legislatures and fixing their numbers in tune with the latest census data. As stipulated in Art. 82 of the Indian Constitution, this exercise was conducted after every census until the 1971 census, when the strength of the Lok Sabha, or the lower chamber of the parliament, was raised to 543. In 1976, to promote population control measures, the Indira Gandhi government froze the constitutional provision mandating decennial adjustment of electoral seats until 2000, and in 2001 the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government extended the freeze until 2026. Both the 1976 and 2001 freezes required constitutional amendments (the 42^nd and 84^th amendments, respectively), pointing to a political consensus on this issue even as India’s population exploded in these decades with some obvious regional imbalances between the Northern and Southern regions of the country.

Recently, the Indian government led by Narendra Modi proposed the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, which provides for, inter alia, delimitation and about 50% increase (from 543 to 850) in the strength of the Lok Sabha. At one level, it cannot be gainsaid that the most populous country in the world should have a more representative parliament, rather than be stuck with the current levels of representation based on the 1971 census. The new Indian Parliament building, inaugurated in 2023 with a seating capacity for over 1200 legislators, makes the expansion of democracy in India less logistically challenging.  At another level, there is a palpable fear that delimitation will further erode the regional balance between less populous and advanced Southern states and more populous and poor Northern states. It is also feared that this move will further corrode whatever federal guarantees remain in a constitution and polity that have a unitary tilt. How do we historically approach this face-off between the imperatives of democracy and federalism in India today? I suggest that the constitutional and political debates in late colonial India on questions of democracy and federalism show a similar face-off, which fundamentally defined postcolonial India’s shaky tryst with federalism.

Two hundred years of British colonialism in the subcontinent and the resultant social and political fissures made democracy an unalloyed good for the anticolonial nationalists. So much so that what mattered to the Indian nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was the preservation of Indian unity and embrace of a parliamentary democracy to safeguard Indians’ right to rule themselves over and above entrenching federalism as indisputably suitable for India’s postcolonial trajectory.

Neither democracy, nationalism, nor federalism were above debate in late colonial India or the rest of the world. Many observers of the time, including thinkers like Hannah Arendt, saw the World Wars as a tragedy inflicted by the ills of nationalism and the nation-state that privileged the idea of statehood for ethnically or linguistically defined homogenous nations.

Critique of Parliamentary Democracy

Late colonial India too saw a range of critiques on democracy and federalism from different groups. One such group was the Indian Princely States, which were semi-independent native states that were indirectly ruled by the British through treaties and formed a third of colonial India’s landmass. These states and their rulers, by virtue of their unique relationship with the British, remained indifferent to democracy for most of India’s colonial history. Theoretically, the princely states were not parts of British India and formed a separate entity by themselves, which the Indian States Committee Report of 1928, a committee appointed by the British government to study their relationship with the princely states, referred to as “Indian India.” The Indian Muslims for the most part also remained skeptical of democracy as an indisputable good for the possibility of a Hindu-majority rule loomed large over them. This fear of the majority rule, something that parliamentary democracy considers to be its ideal, made sense only in places where the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity was not too complex to be encapsulated in a simple formula for a first-past-the-post system of rule. It is precisely on this ground that we see a convergence of Muslim and princely political thinking on the question of India’s future. A simple parliamentary democracy would not serve the interests of either the princes or the minorities like the Muslims. This realization shaped their attitude toward constitutional debates in India from the late 1920s through the demission of the British Empire in India.

One example of this thinking may be seen in the influential book Federal India (1930), written by K. M. Panikkar and K. N. Haksar, two leading statesmen from the princely states, on the eve of the Round Table Conferences in London. These conferences convened from 1930 to 1932 were attended by representatives from all major Indian parties and debated a single question: should the future constitution of India be federal or unitary? Panikkar and Haksar’s book categorically rejected parliamentary or Westminster-style government as suitable for India. The power of this critique had a real lasting impact among many princely leaders and is best instantiated by the attempts led by C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, the last prime minister of the princely state of Travancore (part of present-day Kerala), to keep the state independent in 1947 on the ostensible ground that in a unitary, parliamentary India, states like Travancore would not be able to remain independent or exercise its historical sovereignty. The advocacies of the Indian princely states, the liberals, and the Muslims were a major reason why there was a political consensus on the desirability of an Indian federation, consisting of both British and princely India, after the London conferences.

Decline of Provincial Autonomy

When the Government of India Act was legislated in 1935 (at the time, arguably, the longest constitution the British parliament enacted) to provide for an Indian federation comprising of both British and princely India, the constitutional thinking on India’s future looked very different. Even as the Act was roundly criticized by Indian nationalists, including Mahatma Gandhi, its jurisprudence was based on the idea that people were not the only repositories of sovereignty in India; states were to be sovereigns too. At one level, it did make sense that the radical ideal of popular sovereignty would not appeal to a considerable section of Indians, and it would be too abrupt a break with India’s history of layered and federated forms of sovereignty, where sovereignty was not understood as invested only in one entity, even if it were the people.

The Act of 1935 proposed a decentralized approach to elections and delimitations, where provinces had the right to shape their own constituencies and electoral rolls. Thus, we see in Schedule VI of the Act, for example, Madras and Bombay provinces were to have different laws of residency requirement (120 and 180 days of residency in the previous year, respectively) for voters. The idea of an Indian federal government regulating elections at all levels was quite alien at the time, as the states/provinces were understood to have residual powers. This line of thinking continued throughout the 1930s and well into the late 1940s. When Jawaharlal Nehru made his famous speech on the Objective Resolution in the Constituent Assembly in December 1946, he made a discomfiting concession to the princes and Muslims. Even as popular sovereignty for him was the zeitgeist of the time, he grudgingly envisioned a constitution that was bottom-up, rather than top-down, wherein the provinces/states enjoyed residual powers.

In the early years of the Constituent Assembly Debates (1946–50), there was a general acceptance that the units of the federation would have inviolable rights. This is best evidenced in the work of the Provincial Constitution Committee, set up under the chairmanship of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, to examine the structure and powers of the provinces. Clause 22 of the report of this committee laid down that delimitation of the territorial constituencies was to be a provincial matter. But in the next few years, the debates in the Assembly would change drastically, no less due to political convulsions of the time, like the creation of Pakistan and the integration of 560-odd Indian princely states after the British made a hasty exit from India in August 1947 unilaterally renouncing their treaty relationships with the states.

Against Federalism

The increasing attrition of federal elements and the fear of balkanization would direct Indian Constitution-making into a more unitary path so much so that the final text of the Indian Constitution of 1950 did not even mention the word federation. B. R. Ambedkar, the chief author of the Indian Constitution, free India’s first Law Minister, and a Dalit icon, had deep-seated reservations about federalism at least from 1939, when he wrote his book Federation versus Freedom. As the title itself suggests, he considered federalism as curbing India’s political freedom, which he believed would be compromised by the princely states, a traditionally conservative group that stood to gain the most from a federal structure. Ambedkar would persuade B.N. Rau, another key author of the Constitution, to make amends to a draft Rau wrote and remove the words “federation” and “federal” from it and replace them with “Union,” signifying a tightly knit, top-down polity.

The eventual shape of the Constitution proved to be more unitary, with very few safeguards given to preserve provincial autonomy. In Indian nationalist thought, the fear that provincial autonomy would only have a deleterious impact on India’s fragile unity became axiomatic. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, while addressing a group of provincial ministers, said that history teaches us two things: “One is that territorial integrity should be preserved in India and the other that people should be allowed to grow according to their own genius. But that, if allowed to remain by itself, may lead to the strengthening of the disruptive forces in the country.” This constant tussle between unity and disintegration is emblematic of Nehruvian political thought in many respects at least from the mid-1930s.

Thus, it was no surprise that matters of delimitation and electoral rolls would be taken away from the purview of provincial governments. By virtue of Article 327, the Constitution invested the exclusive right of delimitation with the federal parliament. Of course, this was a corollary of the fact that the Indian states/provinces were to be divested of the right to secede or enjoy residual powers or have territorial inviolability. By contrast, the United States Constitution (Art. 1 Sec. 4) invests the power to delimit or redistrict the electoral constituencies with the states, which also enjoy residual or unenumerated powers.

Reconciling Federalism and Democracy

This history should be salutary for the present face-off between democracy and federalism in India today. If democracy as championed by the Indian anticolonial nationalists foiled the attempts to inscribe a more robust federal structure for India wherein units could exercise certain inviolable rights and make them equal partners in governance, today we are seeing the opposite. The states that will get fewer seats through the delimitation fear that federalism will be the casualty and are standing in the way of India being a truly descriptive or representative democracy.

The delimitation move has been interpreted by its detractors as a punishment for Southern states that succeeded in controlling population growth and ensuring higher economic growth in comparison to the poorer and populous states in the North like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. At one level, this is a profoundly anti-democratic argument, yet the argument has power in the context of southern states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which were historically strong advocates of federalism and the fear that their federal bargain is being compromised now. Not only do these advanced states contribute more to the federal coffers, but in the face of delimitation they will also have less control over the levers of power in Delhi.

The strong opposition based on federal grounds resulted in the Constitution Amendment Bill failing to garner 2/3 votes in the lower house. It is one of the tragedies of postcolonial India that democracy and federalism have come into conflict when they both should serve the interests of the people. Perhaps this conflict is a symptom of the peculiar historical trajectory of India, where rather than a compromise, the imperatives of democracy overshadowed the needs of federalism for a country of India’s size and diversity.

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