Auditing the workings of democracy and federalism in India is conceptually both very interesting and very challenging. Issues at several levels of analysis need to be examined, from the legal constitutional level where forms of power sharing between the different tiers of government are of relevance, to the political sociological level where the relationship between cultural identity and administrative region is relevant, to the political theoretical level where the crucial relationship between ‘political compromise’ and the ‘public interest’ is of interest. This last level is ignored in the literature on federalism in India which, in large part, is mainly preoccupied with aspects of institutional design. It is, however, of considerable importance to the debates on democracy, particularly those concerned with political processes.

This paper attempts to connect, both tangentially and directly, with some of these questions of political process. When thinking about the working of democracy and federalism we need to ask, for example, whether political compromise promotes the public interest, as some may seek to argue that since it has at its very core an accommodative politics that attempts to forge deals with challengers, even if they are opposed to one's beliefs, does such compromise undermine the public interest as it dilutes one's goals through its strategy of adjustment with divergent beliefs – goals that give legitimacy to one's political agency? Or, looked at another way, is the public interest nothing more than an aggregation of specific interests at any particular time and not some transcendental ideal beckoning into the future?