“India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” The words “Union of…

The framers of the Indian Constitution deliberately borrowed individual structural provisions from several different national constitutions rather than modelling the whole document on any single one; each borrowed idea can be traced to the specific country whose own provision most closely matches it.

Article 1 of the Indian Constitution opens with the words “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” The drafting committee's own footnote to the Draft Constitution of 1948 records that describing India as a “Union” followed the preamble of the British North America Act, 1867 — the founding statute of the Canadian federation, now called the Constitution Act, 1867. The phrase therefore signals a single, indestructible union: the States did not come together by an agreement among themselves and cannot leave it unilaterally, even though Parliament may reorganise, rename, or resize any individual State. The Canadian federation carries the same design — once-separate provinces welded into a permanent union with no right of unilateral secession, a strong Centre, residuary powers vested in the Centre, and provincial Lieutenant Governors appointed by the federal Governor General in Council.

Each of the other constitutions named supplied a different set of ideas to India:

So among the options offered, the “Union of States” wording in Article 1 was adopted from the Constitution of Canada.