Regional parties, typically in the form of state-based parties, operated as agencies and mechanisms to negotiate and organise power, both at the central and state levels, and emerged on India’s democratic infrastructure as ‘multi-state’ parties largely based on regional-ethnic style. Few parties, for instance the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh, represented the features of an ‘electoralist party’, focusing on the distinct social constituencies along with its ethnic tropes. Coalition politics, since the 1990s, gave way to regional parties and therefore multi-party coalitions, and marked the deepening of the federalisation and democratisation processes, not only on the ideological vision but on the spatial trajectory too. The political process, from the 1990s onwards, marked the internalisation of federal norms and the state leaders of state-based parties carved out a new federal space of mutual power negotiations between the nation and the region. BJP, in the bargaining process, adroitly manipulated the peripheral federal cleavages and supported the carving out of new states from the belligerent regions of the existing states. The puzzle that India’s federal system is gets further complicated when regional parties, championing special and exclusive interests, coalesce with national parties and simultaneously with the other regional parties, and their leaders, striking a posture as a national leader, try to contextualise the regional party within the category of nation-state.