ABSTRACT
India was the first country in the Afro-Asian world to adopt a parliamentary and a federal type government. This meant two important departures from the tradition of government in the Indian history. First, pre-British as well as British India, which primarily followed the common law system, opted to join a comprehensively codified system of a written parliamentary federal constitution and a corpus of positive law, barring a few exceptions. Second, the Indian Constitution also incorporated a strong institution of judicial review predicated on (a) a limited separation of powers between various organs of government (limited due to the fusion of powers between the parliament and the executive), (b) the vertical distribution of political authority, due to the adoption of federalism and (c) the constitutional entrenchment of fundamental rights of citizens.
