Does ethnofederalism explain the success of Indian federalism?

Ethnofederalism has been contested as a solution for diverse societies as seen recently in Nepal (where federalism has been accepted, but the design and number of units remains heavily contested) and Myanmar (where ethnic minority demands for increasing federalization have had to take a back seat to the demands for increasing democracy). It remains a heavily contested subject in Sri Lanka. Concerns are expressed that ethnofederalism will increase pressures for secession and/or lead to increased violence, through increasing a sense of separateness of the people living within that territory, providing resources for political entrepreneurs to mobilize groups against the center and will lead to the persecution of minorities within the ethnofederal units. India is an example of a federation that appears to demonstrate that ethnofederalism decreases rather than increases conflict through its successful reorganization of states along linguistic lines. However, a group-level analysis reveals a more diverse picture. India has simultaneously been both a success and a failure at conflict management

A move to majoritarian nationalism?: challenges of representation in South Asia

Despite India’s status as the world’s largest democracy and increasing turnouts in many of the countries of South Asia, recent elections raise concerns about the threat to democracy in the form of majoritarianism. Many of the countries of South Asia are extremely diverse and (mainly) informal mechanisms of accommodation of minorities have been deployed. At the same time concerns about the threat to minority rights in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have been strongly articulated. It is notable that those countries of South Asia, such as Sri Lanka and Pakistan, which have not accommodated their non-dominant groups, have witnessed high levels of conflict. India has been more accommodative, of both linguistic and religious minorities. However, it is precisely this process of accommodation that many in India now worry will be undermined by Hindu majoritarianism

India's federal success: recognition is the way forward

In India, linguistic reorganisation solidified support for the Indian state and the Indian nation, rather than leading to political balkanisation and the breakup of the country. Katharine Adeney writes that not only is secession never the easy option, but a rallying cry for secession will only be successful if the group feels its identity and interests are not protected

Federal formation and consociational stabilisation: the politics of national identity articulation and ethnic conflict regulation in India and Pakistan

This thesis is a comparative investigation of how federal institutions accommodated linguistic and religious identities in India and Pakistan. There are three explanatory variables. The first is the history of self-rule for the principalities within South Asia; tracing continuities in territorial autonomy from the Mughals up to independence. The second is the distribution of linguistic and religious identities within the states of India and Pakistan, both at the provincial and national levels. The third is the articulation of a national identity in India and Pakistan. These explanatory variables are not independent of one another; their interaction accounts for the different strategies adopted by India and Pakistan in the formation and stabilisation of their federations. The differences in federal design are calculated according to a scoring system that measures the degree of consociationalism within the federal plans proposed before independence, and the constitutions created after independence. The state-sponsored national identities are distinguished according to their recognition of identities in the public and private spheres. They are further categorised according to the costs for a non-dominant group of being managed by this strategy. The three explanatory variables explain why linguistically homogeneous states were created in India but not in Pakistan. It is argued that this variable explains the stabilisation or otherwise of their federations. It therefore confirms Wilkinson's rebuttal of Lijphart's claim that India under Nehru was consociational. Unlike Wilkinson, it argues that the degrees of consociationalism that emerged since the formation of the constitution have enhanced federal stabilisation within India. It defines federal stabilisation according to continuity in state borders, the number and type of secessionist movements, but more importantly by correlating the effective number of linguistic groups at state level with the effective number of parties in national elections. It concludes that federal accommodation of linguistic groups in homogeneous provinces has enabled the party system to fractionalise in India and Pakistan; an indication of the security of these groups. Where secessionist movements have existed in India and Pakistan, their emergence is explained by the lack of security for a group - defined on either linguistic or alternative criteria

The Impact of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor on Pakistan’s Federal System: The Politics of the CPEC

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is often portrayed as the flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative. While much attention has been devoted to its geopolitical repercussions, its impacts on Pakistan’s federal system and interprovincial relations have not yet been explored. Organized around interviews conducted in 2015, 2018, and 2019, this article demonstrates that the construction of the economic corridor is acting as a centripetal force in Pakistan’s federal structure, despite the potential for such a large external investment to redress the disparities between provinces

Power-sharing in the world's largest democracy:Informal consociationalism in India (and its decline?)

© 2019 Swiss Political Science Association India is one of the most diverse countries of the world but operates with a majoritarian Westminster constitution and simple plurality electoral system, albeit also with a federal structure. It was eventually coded as consociational by Arend Lijphart (1996) but this coding was questioned by authors such as Wilkinson (2000) and Adeney (2002). This article assesses the nature of both de jure and de facto power-sharing in India over its 70 years of independence and tracks the evolution of de jure and de facto power-sharing in relation to four dimensions of diversity: religion, caste, territory and language. It questions whether the electoral success of Hindu nationalism and the increasing acceptance of ethnic majoritarianism has reduced the degree of power-sharing in India

How can we model ethnic democracy? An application to contemporary India

The status of India as the world's largest democracy is often lauded, but the re‐election of the overtly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 has increased concerns about the threat to India's multinational democracy and the rule of law. India is not the only democracy facing challenges related to majoritarian nationalism; there has been a worldwide rise in the language of majority ‘rights’ in democratic systems. The importance of analysing the extent to which the rights of majorities are being increasingly institutionalized within democratic systems has therefore increased. It is vitally important to identify whether tendencies toward ethnic democracy are increasing (and the conditions under which they do so). There may well be red flags that emerge in democratic systems, heralding the potential direction of travel. This article proposes a methodology to identify degrees of ethnic democracy using a combination of formal and informal measures and illustrates it by assessing India through an examination of anti‐Muslim policies and rhetoric

Current challenges to multinational federalism in India

India’s multinational federation has experienced multiple challenges in the last 25 years, relating to the rise of coalition politics and the process of economic liberalisation, both of which have increased the power of some of the states of the federation at the expense of others. The internal borders of India continue to be restructured, with the latest state, Telangana, created in 2014. India is often seen as a successful multinational federation but it is important to recognise the limitations of this success, as well as the areas where the rise of an aggressive Hindu nationalism poses a powerful threat to India’s multinational federal democracy

How China and Pakistan Negotiate

Since being officially launched in April 2015, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been one of the most watched set of projects under the aegis of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Having already injected around $25 billion into Pakistan, the CPEC not only has been dubbed the “flagship project” of the BRI, but it also holds a central role in Beijing’s global ambitions.1 While much has been said about the geopolitical implications of the CPEC, including for both India and the United States, less attention has been devoted to providing in-depth insights into the mechanics of how the BRI is unfolding on the ground in Pakistan. How do China and Pakistan negotiate the terms of CPEC deals? To what extent has Islamabad managed to exert agency in its dealings with Beijing? How does China adapt to the contexts it operates in? By now, the CPEC has been subject to much media, academic, and policy scrutiny, but these questions have not been answered. This paper foregrounds the importance of adopting a relational approach to studying how the BRI unfolds on the ground. This entails looking at how Pakistan and China have negotiated the CPEC’s energy, infrastructure, and industrial cooperation projects. The analysis is based on semi-structured elite interviews conducted by the two authors during three rounds of fieldwork in 2015, 2018, and 2020–2021 triangulated with a host of official reports, statements, and newspaper articles

How to understand Pakistan’s hybrid regime: the importance of a multidimensional continuum

Pakistan has had a chequered democratic history but elections in 2013 marked a second turnover in power, and the first transition in Pakistan’s history from one freely elected government to another. How do we best categorize (and therefore understand) political developments in Pakistan? Is it now safe to categorize it as an electoral democracy or is it still a hybrid case of democracy? Using the Pakistani case as an example, this article argues that hybrid regimes deserve consideration as a separate case (rather than as a diminished sub type of democracy or authoritarianism), but must be categorised along a multidimensional continuum to understand the dynamics of power within the political system