The Global Review of Ethnopolitics Vol. 2 no. 2, January 2003, 52-64 Copyright © The individual contributors 2002. All rights reserved. FORUM: I NDI A Critical Reflections on Celebrating Success: A Response to Maya Chadda Gurharpal Singh, University of Birmingham Maya Chadda’s article in The Global Review of Ethnopolitics (Chadda 2002) raises a number of issues that are worthy of serious discussion. It represents one current in the study of developing societies that argue that India has evolved into a form of federalism which has successfully contributed to the consolidation of democracy and relatively benign management of ethnic conflicts. This argument is normally presented with reference to India’s farsighted constitutional design, its benevolent management by the Indian National Congress (INC) under Nehru, and the social pluralism of Indian society that underpins the political arrangements. There are, however, several problems with this approach some of which Chadda does not address or that she dismisses out of hand. First, on reading the article we do not get a clear exposition of the analytical framework that explains the development of centre-state relations in India. The nearest we get is the idea of ‘relational control and interlocking balance’ (Chadda 2000: 49) and necessary conditions for its effective functioning (Chadda 2000: 50). These are merely descriptive categories, and one is at loss to fathom the meaning of ‘layered order’. That a clear analytical framework exists has been highlighted by scholars like Brass (1991: Ch. 5). It is further evident in the constitutional discourses on India’s distinctive ‘civilisational’ identity as a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multicultural entity which foreclosed any debate about India as a multi-national state. This identity and how it has been managed has been determined by the political coalitions that have dominated Indian politics. Above all, it has been the political interests of these coalitions that have structured how Indian federalism has been reshaped. In understanding the evolution of centre-state relations in India we need a framework that can give us a better handle on the relationship between India’s external and internal boundaries, between India’s conception of itself and its internal order. I have attempted to do this, and reached conclusions diametrically opposed to those of Chadda (Singh 2001). Rather than suggest that the ‘creative’ management of relations with enemies provided for an imaginative federal solution to India’s borderlands, I argue that following partition India’s conception of its national identity has created a sharp divide between the core and peripheral states. That is why the peripheral states have remained the sites of resilient ethno-national movements that have done so much to frustrate India’s nation- building efforts (Singh 2000). That is why the rules used for reshaping the core of Indian federalism are inapplicable in the periphery. And that is why different modes of ‘integration’—coercion and cooption – are used to retain control. Second, Chadda dismisses the validity of an alternative reading of Indian history that was aborted by the partition, a history with constitutional designs that could have averted partition (Talbot and Singh 1999). It is no doubt difficult to conjecture whether such an alternative would have produced a state (or states) that would have been more or less democratic than today’s India but, arguably, that would have been more attuned with the provincial realities of subcontential India than the centralised Nehruvian state that subsequently emerged. Chadda has not satisfactorily explained why a subcontinent of the regions continues to have substantial appeal and why India as a nation-state remains a deeply contested fact. The recent mobilisation over Kashmir has demonstrated the heavy price India has had to pay for its nation-building efforts. It also illustrates that despite over 50 years of ‘violent control’, the Indian state in Kashmir has been unable to establish the kind of legitimacy one would expect of a consolidated nation state, even allowing for the devious machinations of India’s enemies.