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.

That historical beginning gives the book its interpretive strength. Kumar does not treat federalism as a fixed institutional bargain struck in 1950. He presents it as an evolving relationship, continually renegotiated through political conflict. The history that follows is therefore not merely a catalogue of constitutional amendments and judicial decisions. It is a history of pressure points: linguistic reorganization, Centre-State confrontations, the misuse of Article 356, the expansion of local government through the 73rd and 74th Amendments, and the increasingly consequential struggle over financial resources.

Article 356 emerges as one of the clearest examples of the distance between constitutional design and political practice. The power to impose President’s Rule was conceived as an exceptional safeguard, but its repeated use for partisan purposes exposed the vulnerability of elected State governments to the Centre. Kumar’s account places this episode within the larger story of Indian federalism: constitutional provisions do not operate independently of political culture. A formally federal arrangement can become centralized when conventions of restraint weaken.

The book is particularly persuasive when it turns to fiscal federalism, perhaps the least dramatic but most consequential arena of Centre-State relations.

Political autonomy means little if States lack the resources to pursue their own priorities. The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax represents a revealing case. GST was presented as a major step toward a common national market, but it also altered the fiscal relationship between the Centre and the States, making the institutions and negotiations surrounding revenue-sharing central to the federal compact. Kumar’s treatment of this terrain underscores an important point: federalism is about who has the money to govern.

This emphasis on negotiation is what makes the book’s treatment of the post-2014 period especially significant. Kumar argues that the rise of an assertive majoritarian politics, shaped by Hindutva ideology, has coincided with an aggressive concentration of power at the Centre. The abrogation of Article 370 becomes a crucial case study, because it raises questions about the limits of unilateral central authority in a system premised on differentiated regional arrangements. Likewise, the emerging anxieties around delimitation point toward another potential fault line: how can political representation remain equitable when demographic change is uneven across States, particularly when some States have pursued population-control policies more successfully than others?

The force of Federalism lies in the way these apparently separate controversies begin to illuminate one another. GST, Article 356, Article 370 and delimitation belong to different constitutional domains, but each concerns the distribution of power within the Union. Kumar’s larger argument is that federalism is sustained by habits of consultation, institutional restraint and political pluralism. When those habits erode, constitutional centralization can proceed even without formally abolishing the federal structure.

There are moments when the book’s contemporary argument risks making the historical narrative feel too neatly arranged around the present crisis. The long history of Indian federalism contains contradictions that resist a simple Centre-versus-States binary, and State governments themselves have often exercised power in ways that complicate the language of pluralism. Yet this tension does not diminish the book’s central achievement. Instead, it reminds us that federalism has always been an imperfect practice rather than a settled formula.

What emerges finally is less a defence of federalism as an institutional category than a defence of disagreement within a constitutional democracy. The Indian Union has survived in part because it has repeatedly absorbed demands for linguistic, regional and political autonomy without allowing those demands to become synonymous with disintegration. Federalism, in Kumar’s account, is therefore a mechanism of accommodation: a way of making room for difference without surrendering the idea of a common political community.

That makes Federalism an unusually timely constitutional history. Its real subject is not where power is located, but how power is negotiated. At a moment when the balance between Union authority and State autonomy is being tested across courts, legislatures, finances and electoral institutions, Kumar asks us to see federalism as one of the conditions of Indian democracy itself. The book’s warning is consequently also its larger insight: the durability of the Republic may depend less on the strength of its Centre than on whether its political system retains the capacity to accommodate voices beyond it.

About the book

A timely account of India’s federal crisis—from the Emergency and misuse of Article 356 to GST, the abrogation of Article 370, delimita¬tion anxieties and aggressive centralization of power after 2014.

At a time when the Indian Constitution is under sustained strain, this incisive monograph turns to one of its most foundational ideas: federalism. Although the word itself finds no place in the text of the Constitution, it has shaped the Republic’s attempt to reconcile unity with an extraordinary diversity of language, region, culture and political aspiration.

Drawing on the Constituent Assembly debates—shaped by earlier constitutional arrangements as well as the upheaval of Partition—Avinash Kumar traces how India’s distinctive federal arrangement, a ‘Union of States’ with a marked tilt to the Centre, came into being, and follows its evolution through the subsequent history of the Republic. He shows how this structure has been continually tested: through linguistic reorganization, the use and misuse of Article 356, the deepening of decentralization through the 73rd and 74th Amendments, and the persistent contestations between Central authority and State autonomy, nowhere sharper than in fiscal federalism.

The book argues that the post-2014 phase of aggressive centralization, driven by Hindutva ideology, is a challenge to the plural and negotiated character of the Indian Union, and raises urgent questions about the future of federal democracy in India.

Historical in scope and contemporary in its concerns, this monograph invites readers to rethink federalism not as a technical arrangement, but as a living constitutional principle—one that remains essential to sustaining India’s democratic and inclusive order.

About the Author

Dr Avinash Kumar is a historian and civil society leader whose work bridges academic scholarship with policy and advocacy. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University and was a Charles Wallace Fellow at SOAS, University of London. Over two decades, he has held senior leadership roles at Amnesty International, WaterAid and Oxfam. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Equity Studies and works with Focus on the Global South, an activist think tank.