State politics in India

State politics assumes an intimate connotation within a federal system where states operate as units of the nation, though not as independent and truly autonomous political entities. The creation of a federal structure implies the existence of territorial, cultural, linguistic, religious and socio-economic differences among the people of a nation, which make the states differ greatly in the degree to which they fit in this pattern. In the organization and spirit of their politics the states vary markedly. It is true that the impact of national policies and parties powerfully affect the form and behaviour of state systems. Rut it is equally true that this impact strikes different states differently, contributing to the oddities and variations in organisation and spirit of state politics which calls for basic and exclusive research. In India which borrowed a "parliamentary-federal" constitutional system from the west, however, state politics as a field of political science has been tbe laggard of the discipline. Though it is no longer a "lost world"! or the site of "Dullsville">, it has yet to enter into the mainstream of political science research with a view to assuming the status
of a unique field of study.