Dimensions of Indian Democracy

Abstract

Democracy in India, a poor and notoriously diverse country, has succeeded for more than half the twentieth century and seems likely to succeed as well in the twenty-first. The story of India’s state formation since independence has included a story of rising influence on the part of the federal states. At independence in 1947, India inherited the British-brokered constitution of 1935. It embodied two possibilities, a centralized authoritarian “vice-regal†state and a decentralized, or federal, parliamentary state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the “great leader†of Pakistan, chose the former option, in effect acting as the successor to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British raj’s last viceroy and governor-general of India. Jawaharlal Nehru, despite his personal penchant for centralized rationalization, selected the latter course and became the prime minister of a parliamentary government in a federal system.