ABSTRACT
India is an interesting case to study hybridity. The makers of India’s constitution were less concerned with theories of parliamentarianism or federalism than with India’s specific needs, given the lessons of its history and the tasks of state building and nation building ahead. It is not, therefore, surprising that the constitution and the political system cannot be categorized easily as federal or unitary, in part because it has evolved from being highly centralized to being more decentralized today. India, like Canada and Australia, also belongs to the family of the Commonwealth parliamentary federations (Watts, 2008; Saxena, 2010). In what follows, the Indian experience is analysed to illustrate suggestive theorization about the ‘hybrid’ state (Loughlin, 2009).
