The most significant development in India’s constitutional history is the consolidation of a parliamentary form of government that broadly corresponds with the Westminster model. What is equally striking is the growth of federalism in India in spite of parliamentary government that, in its classical form, flourished within a unitary system of government. Whereas Britain is identified as a classical model of parliamentary government, the United States is always referred to as an ideal form of federal government. Both these political systems have evolved specific constitutional practices in consonance with their ideological preferences and socio-economic requirements. What largely explains the emergence of specific types of governance in both the United Kingdom and United States is the peculiar historical circumstances in which they emerged as nation-states. In view of a gradual decline of monarchy in Britain, parliament became sovereign, reflecting popular aspirations, articulated through a well-devised system of elective democracy; whereas in the United States the decision of the constituent units to merge for a strong political system led to the rise of a union that held power to sustain the federal arrangement that emerged following the 1787 Philadelphia Conference. This is, however, not to suggest that there is a ‘conflict’ between parliamentary sovereignty and federalism as theoretical categories. Federalism does not necessarily imply ‘divided’ sovereignty, incompatible with the notion of parliamentary supremacy, any more than parliamentary government seeks to establish ‘unfettered’ majority rule. Historically speaking, in framing the Dominion Constitutions (for Australia and Canada) in the early 1900s, ‘parliaments’ were not made ‘supreme’. Instead, it was the Constitution that enjoyed supreme authority, exercised through judicial review (by the Privy Council). This is a common pattern in parliamentary federalism, in which constitutional supremacy is perhaps the most effective device to avoid distortions in majority rule.