ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of the role of regional business, collectively represented by the trade associations and different regional chambers of commerce and industry, in the creation of Indian federation, premised on linguistic provinces in colonial India and its further federalization through fiscal and administrative reforms or political accommodation in postcolonial India. The process is still on and has been in continuation for the past 125 years, since 1887, when the Indian business chambers began to be formed among the different nationalities in different regions. The first Indian merchants’ chamber, different from the British, was formed in 1883 in Kakinada (Andhra Pradesh). It was called the Native Merchants Chamber. It was followed by the formation of Bengal National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BNCCI) in 1887. Subsequently, in the decades to come many other chambers were formed; most prominent among them were the Southern Indian Chambers of Commerce (1909) and the Andhra Chamber of Commerce and Industry (1928). The chapter also indicates an emerging subterranean trend of gradual marginalization of regional parties, which has played stellar role in the federalization process in postcolonial India. The new social milieu of globalization that propels standardized attributes of the market in different regions drove the regions closer to each other, with similar traits making the regional parties with their unique identities irrelevant. Simultaneously, the regional business’s expansion in the pan-Indian market, and ventures with global capital impacted its relations with the regional parties. The gradual expansion of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) substituting the regional parties reflects this emerging trend.
