FEDERALISM ON TRIAL: WHAT BOMMAI AND NSW V COMMONWEALTH REVEAL ABOUT INDIA AND AUSTRALIA

Federalism, on paper, looks like a fairly settled arrangement, it is a written division of powers between a centre and its constituent units. In practice, both India and Australia show that the real shape of federalism owes far more to how courts read that division than to the text itself. Two judgments in particular capture this: S.R. Bommai v Union of India (1994) from the Indian Supreme Court, and New South Wales v Commonwealth (2006) from the High Court of Australia. Decided more than a decade apart, in constitutional systems built on very different assumptions, they nonetheless tell a similar underlying story that it is judicial interpretation, not constitutional drafting, which ends up deciding how much room the states actually have to breathe. This piece walks through both cases and then places them side by side to see what that comparison actually shows about the two federal models.