Book Review: Federalism

Team Kitaab reviews Federalism by Dr Avinash Kumar (Speaking Tiger, 2026), calling it an unusually timely constitutional history.

Federalism is one of those constitutional ideas that can appear deceptively technical until political power begins to move. Then its abstractions—Union and State, fiscal authority, legislative competence, constitutional restraint—become questions of everyday democratic life. Avinash Kumar’s Federalism arrives with precisely this sense of urgency. Its subject is an institutional principle, but its deeper concern is the character of the Indian republic: how can a country of extraordinary linguistic, cultural and political diversity remain a union without becoming merely a centralized state?

The book’s most useful intervention is to recover federalism from the specialist vocabulary of constitutional law. The Constitution does not use the word itself; instead, it describes India as a Union of States, a formulation that reflects both the historical circumstances of the Republic’s birth and the anxieties of its founders. Kumar returns to the Constituent Assembly debates to examine why India’s framers deliberately constructed a federation with a strong Centre. Partition, political fragmentation and the fear of centrifugal forces made central authority appear necessary. Yet the resulting constitutional architecture was never intended to erase regional political identities. Its central question, rather, was how unity might be preserved through accommodation.