ABSTRACT
Introduction Federalism in India, Pakistan and Malaysia has its origins in the British colonial period, but it cannot be claimed that in all three countries it is a colonial legacy. As far as India was concerned, the nationalists, especially the Indian National Congress (INC) rejected many colonial institutional measures such as the Government of India Act, 1935, and the Cabinet Mission Plan in favour of a radical alterative which most suited the conditions of the country, and which fulfilled the democratic wishes of the people of a multi-ethnic country. However, since the idea of a federation had its roots in the colonial period (institutionally speaking), the derivative character of federalism, and its Western origin (conceptually speaking), could not help but be highlighted.1 It must be accepted that, in these countries, there was little evidence of an indigenous pre-colonial tradition of political thought countries defending federalism both as a political principle of governance simultaneously advocating a shared-and a self-rule within the same polity, and as a form of government that resulted from the above combination.2 The anti-colonial nationalist leaders of these countries, who very often thought of federal solutions of governance after Independence did so only as an improvisation of the colonial idea, and as an improvement on it. At any rate, the development of federalism in these countries has remained enmeshed with colonialism, anti-colonial nationalist movements, and post-colonial experiments with democracy and nation-building. This entanglement has called for greater attention to be paid to the recognition of ethno-regional/national identity in both the categorical and the distributional senses. The successes or failures in this respect have determined the overall effectiveness of the federal design in the countries concerned. Three more preliminary remarks are in order before embarking on a detailed discussion of the issue. First, the discussion of the origin and development of federalism in the colonial period will be limited to Malaysia and India, because Pakistan’s ‘federalism’ is a post-colonial phenomenon. Interestingly though, M. A. Jinnah, widely taken to be the founding father of Pakistan, was one of the earliest nationalist leaders of India to demand a federation. And the movement for a separate sovereign nation-state of Pakistan out with India (which became a
reality on 14 August 1947) had gravely affected the evolution of federalism in the colonial period. Second, the discussion of the historical development of federalism in these countries is important, because the current discourse of federalism in these countries and its institutional development are inseparable from the colonial and nationalist legacy. Third, in the post-colonial period, federalism, much revised, also became conjoined with democracy, at least, regularly and practically in India and Malaysia, and very haltingly, and more formally, in Pakistan. This, comparatively speaking, made all the difference in the successes or failures of federalism in these countries.
