Who said 'India is a Quasi-Federal State' ?

Question

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Correct — D, K. C. Wheare. Sir Kenneth Clinton Wheare, the Australian constitutional scholar at Oxford, is the source of the label. In his classic study of federal government he judged the Indian Constitution to be at most 'quasi-federal' — in the formulation quoted in every Indian textbook, a unitary State with subsidiary federal features rather than a federal State with subsidiary unitary features. He was reading the centralising provisions: a single Constitution and single citizenship for the whole country, an integrated judiciary in which the High Courts and the Supreme Court form one hierarchy, All-India Services officered by the Union, Governors appointed by the Centre, Parliament's power to legislate on the State List under Articles 249 and 250, the emergency provisions, and above all Article 3, which lets Parliament alter a State's name, area or boundaries by ordinary law without that State's consent. On Wheare's own test — that in a genuine federation each level must be independent within its sphere and guaranteed its existence — a Union that can redraw or rename its units at will is not fully federal. Hence 'quasi-federal'.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) James Bryce was one of the great nineteenth-century students of federal government — 'The American Commonwealth' and 'Studies in History and Jurisprudence' — and Indian writing on federalism borrows his framework. But he wrote long before the Indian Constitution existed and passed no verdict on it. Wrong era, not merely the wrong phrase.  (b) Sir Ivor Jennings (the paper misprints the name) did write on the Indian Constitution and advised on constitution-making in South Asia, which is what makes him a plausible-looking option. He is usually quoted for a different criticism of the Indian Constitution — its sheer length and detail — and not for the classification 'quasi-federal'.  (c) Harold J. Laski was a British political theorist at the London School of Economics, known for his pluralist and socialist writing on the nature of the State, notably 'A Grammar of Politics'. He influenced a generation of Indian students of politics, but the description of India's Constitution as quasi-federal is not his.

Concept: A federation, on the classical test, requires two levels of government, each supreme within a sphere allotted by a written and rigid constitution, with an independent judiciary to police the line. India has all of that on paper — a written Constitution, a division of subjects in the Seventh Schedule, bicameralism at the Centre and an independent judiciary — but it also has a set of provisions that let the Union override or reshape the States. That mixture is why the Constitution nowhere calls India 'federal': Article 1 says 'India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States'. Dr. Ambedkar explained the word in the Constituent Assembly as conveying that the Indian federation was not the result of an agreement among the units and that no unit has the right to secede from it.

State PCS 2019 Q67 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q67 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer