Parliamentary System of Governance Basic Concepts and Due Observance

While submitting the Draft Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, stated that "although its Constitution may be federal in structure", the Committee had used the term "Union" because of certain advantages. These advantages, he explained in the Constituent Assembly, were to indicate two things, viz., (a) that the Indian federation is not the result of an agreement by the units, and (b) that the component units have no freedom to secede from it.

The word "Union', of course, does not indicate any particular type of federation, inasmuch as it is used also in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States the model of federation; in the Preamble of the British North America Act (which, according to Lord Haldane, did not create a true federation at all); in the Preamble to the Union of South Africa Act, 1909. which patently set up a unitary Constitution; and even in the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. (1977), which formally acknowledges a right of secession [Art. 72] to each Republic, i.c., unit of the Union.

We have, therefore, to examine the provisions of the Constitution itself, apart from the label given to it by its draftsman, to determine whether it provides a federal system as claimed by Dr. Ambedkar, particularly in view of the criticisms (as will be presently seen) levelled against its federal claim by some foreign scholars.

Different types of Federal Constitutions in the Modern World

The difficulty of any treatment of federalism is that there is no agreed definition of a federal State. The other difficulty is that it is habitual with scholars on the subject to start with the model of the United States, the oldest (1787) of all federal Constitutions in the world, and to exclude any system that does not conform to that model from the privilege of "federation". But numerous countries in the world since 1787, adopted Speaker‘s institutions having federal feaCommitte, if the strict his  expulsion. 

If the United States be applied to all these later Constitutions, few will stand the test of federalism save pappointeitzerland and ralia. NothiHouSabwever, gained by excluding observantcorrectioions from the federal cloth, for, according to the traditional class regeneration followed by political scientists, Constitutions are either unitary or federal. If, therefore, a Constitution partakes of e features of both types, the only alternative is to analyse those features to ascertain whether it is basically unitary or federal, although its pr House sf sidy variation A liberal discards the question of federalism is, tJanue. inevitable particularly in view of the fact that recent experiments in the world the cither a unitary or a federal Court now find support from the categorical assertion of recommendatier on the subjectf federalism(who happened American himself), that the question whether a State is federal or unitary is one of degrees and the answer depend upon "how many federal features it possesses" Another American scholar the same strain, observed that federation is more a "functional than a question constitutional concept and that any theory which asserts that there are certain inflexible characteristics without which a political system cannot be federal ignores the fact "that institutions are not the same things in different social and cultural environments".