Party System

Political parties are the indispensable machinery of representative democracy. They perform a cluster of irreplaceable functions: they form governments, they organise opposition, they undertake political education, and they carry forward the process of political socialisation by which citizens acquire their political values and orientations. Harold Laski regarded parties as essential to the working of democracy, because it is through them that the popular will is aggregated and translated into public policy. Yet the indispensability of parties has never gone uncontested. Mohandas Gandhi, M.N. Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan, each from a different intellectual starting point, argued in favour of a party-less democracy, holding that parties inevitably foster faction, corruption and the concentration of power, and that a decentralised, participatory politics could dispense with them altogether. The persistence of parties in every functioning democracy suggests that whatever the force of the ideal, the party remains the practical vehicle through which popular preferences are organised, aggregated and given effect.

National Political Parties

A party system refers to the manner in which political parties are structured, how they interact with one another, and how they operate within the politics of a country. It comprehends the number of parties, their relative strengths, and the pattern of relationships among them. A crucial refinement is that the character of a party system is not determined by the sheer number of parties operating in a country, but by the number of parties that possess systemic relevance, that is, parties whose existence and behaviour tangibly affect the direction of competition and the formation of governments. The distinction matters for the Indian case. At the moment of independence, India possessed a multiplicity of parties, yet the party system was universally described as a one-party dominant system, because a single party, the Congress, so overshadowed the field that the presence of numerous smaller parties did not alter the systemic reality.

The comparative typologies of party systems developed by writers such as Maurice Duverger and Giovanni Sartori give precision to the Indian experience. Duverger distinguished between single-party, two-party and multi-party systems and linked them to electoral mechanics, while Sartori refined the classification to distinguish between systems with a dominant party, systems of moderate pluralism, and systems of polarised pluralism, attending to the ideological distance between parties rather than their number alone. Judged by these standards, the Congress era of Indian politics was not a one-party system in the authoritarian sense, but a dominant-party system within a democratic frame. The distinction is critical: the Chinese party system is also a one-party system, but it lacks democratic character, since no opposition is permitted to compete. In India, by contrast, opposition parties were always free to organise, contest and criticise, and although they stood outside the margins of the dominant party's coalitional space, their very presence served as a check upon the autocratic tendencies of the ruling party. It was a system of democratic dominance rather than monopolistic rule.

Zoya Hasan on the Unusual Features of Indian Parties

Zoya Hasan has drawn attention to a series of unusual features that characterise Indian political parties and set them apart from the ideal-typical parties of Western political science. The first is the disappearance of ideology: Indian parties have increasingly become catch-all parties, willing to absorb any programme, group or leader that promises electoral advantage, so that their ideological identities have grown thin and transferable. The second is that parties are oriented towards office rather than policy; the acquisition of governmental power is treated as an end in itself, and programme formation is subordinated to the necessities of coalition arithmetic and electoral calculation. The third is the disconnect between parties and the people, so that parties function as vehicles of leaders rather than as organs of their members or of the broader citizenry. The fourth is the growing connection between political parties and corporate groups, a connection that extends even to communist and socialist parties whose professed ideologies would appear to exclude it. The fifth is the existence of parties with unique nomenclatures such as the AIADMK, whose name conveys no ideological or programmatic content. The sixth is that none of the Indian parties possesses a grand design; they do not aspire to transform society in the manner of the great ideological parties of Europe, but operate pragmatically within the existing order.

Indian parties, Hasan suggests, are marked by paradoxical features. They exhibit a blend of Western bureaucratic structure with indigenous political practices and institutions, so that a formally modern organisation coexists with modes of leadership, patronage and mobilisation that are distinctly traditional. Above all, Indian political parties lack intraparty democracy: internal elections are rare or non-existent, power is concentrated in the hands of a few leaders, and ordinary members have little voice in the selection of candidates or the formulation of policy. The result is a party system that is simultaneously undergoing institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation. The reach of parties is expanding into every corner of the national territory, yet the depth and intensity of their engagement with voters is declining. The role of the citizen has been reduced to the instrumental act of voting, while parties have overlooked the broader agenda of a democratic nation and of nation-building itself.

The Evolution of the Indian Party System

The evolution of the Indian party system can be read as a succession of distinct phases. Up to 1967, the system was dominated by the Congress, a phase described by Morris-Jones as the one-party dominant system and by Rajni Kothari as the Congress system. From 1967 to 1977, the Congress system underwent a breakdown, as the party lost its near-monopoly of power across the states. The period from 1977 to 1979 witnessed an approximation to a two-party system, as a united Janata bloc confronted the Congress at the national level. From 1979 to 1989, a multi-party system emerged as old and new parties proliferated and the Congress recovered only a diminished dominance. From 1989 to 2014, India entered the age of coalition politics, a phase of genuine multi-party democracy in which governments were formed by alliances rather than by any single party. From 2014 onwards, the system has been described as a BJP-dominant party system, in which the Bharatiya Janata Party has secured a position of pre-eminence comparable, in its electoral intensity if not in its form, to that of the Congress in an earlier era.

The Congress system, as theorised by Kothari, was a system of one-party dominance in which the Congress, and no other party, governed at the national level and, with the exceptions of Kerala and Kashmir, at the level of the states as well. Kothari described the Congress as a party of consensus and the other parties as parties of pressure. The party of consensus, in his formulation, possessed the capacity to incorporate diverse interests and to maintain broad support across different sections of society; the Congress was, in effect, a rainbow coalition, a grand coalition coterminous with the social diversity of the nation itself. Its programme could accommodate the interests of peasants, workers, business, the middle classes, minorities and the lower castes, absorbing conflict within its own capacious structure. The parties of pressure, by contrast, represented the specific interests of regional, caste and community groups; they exerted pressure upon the Congress from outside its coalitional space, and their status within the system resembled that of pressure groups operating at the margins of the party system rather than as genuine alternatives for government.

Congress Hegemony and Its Breakdown

The hegemony of the Congress rested ultimately upon its role in the Indian National Movement. Under the leadership of Gandhi, the Congress transformed itself into a mass party, drawing into its ranks peasants, workers and the lower middle classes. It maintained a centrist agenda, rejecting at once communalism and communism, and thereby occupying a broad middle ground of nationalist politics. Jawaharlal Nehru maintained a democratic intellectual climate within the party: he promoted freedom of speech and expression, cultivated a culture of toleration and accommodation, and showed sustained sensitivity towards minorities and weaker sections. Above all, Nehru succeeded in convincing the Indian masses that the Congress was indispensable to the survival of the nation, a conviction that sustained the party's dominance long after the achievement of independence.

The breakdown of the Congress system commenced in 1967, when the Congress lost its majority in nine states. In eight of these states, non-Congress governments came to power for the first time, and in the ninth, the Congress could form a government only as part of a coalition. The causes of this breakdown were both internal and external. Internally, the party suffered the deinstitutionalisation of democracy within its own organisation; power became concentrated in the hands of a single leader and a narrow circle; intraparty elections were abandoned, so that no internal elections were held within the party after 1972; and the central leadership, dependent upon loyalists, lost touch with grassroots leaders and permitted no scope for internal criticism and dissent. Externally, as Yogendra Yadav has argued, the decline of the Congress was linked to the deepening of Indian democracy itself. The first democratic upsurge brought the Other Backward Classes into active political life and propelled them out of the Congress umbrella; the second democratic upsurge did the same for the Dalits. Today the Congress remains to a significant degree the party of minorities and of the Scheduled Tribes; even in the 2014 election, roughly 35 per cent of minority seats went to the Congress. Other causes of decline include the Green Revolution, which created new agrarian wealth and confidence among intermediate castes, and the reorganisation of states, which strengthened regional identities and regional parties. Suhas Palshikar has gone further, arguing that the 2014 election marked not the decline but the death of the Congress as a pan-national force, for the party's social base, as well as its territorial base, has shrunk sharply. In the 2024 election the Congress recovered somewhat, winning 99 seats against the 52 it had won in 2019, but its vote share rose only marginally, from 19.7 per cent to 21.4 per cent, suggesting a stabilisation of weakness rather than a restoration of dominance. Pratap Bhanu Mehta has counselled that the Congress must abandon its majority-and-minority complex, learn the art of strategic alliances, transform itself from a party of defence into a party of transformation, and return to the role of organising social movements rather than restricting itself to electoral calculus.

Regionalisation of the Party System

Politics does not operate in a vacuum, and neither do parties. The Indian party system has been shaped by a range of institutional, social and economic factors that have driven its regionalisation. Institutionally, the delinking of parliamentary and state legislative elections has given regional parties opportunities to mobilise people on local issues without the overshadowing presence of national contests; the federal structure has placed at the disposal of state governments those issues which are of day-to-day relevance to ordinary citizens, advantaging leaders rooted in the localities; and the linguistic reorganisation of states gave rise to dominant castes forming their own regional parties. Socially and economically, the Green Revolution created new economic affluence among the intermediate castes, who translated their economic strength into political assertion; the deepening of social cleavages through the continuous mobilisation of people on ethnic grounds; the growing politicisation of religion; the spread of consciousness about rights and democracy; and, not least, the suspension of democracy during the Emergency, which fragmented the Congress and strengthened regional parties, all contributed to the same process.

The regionalisation of the Indian party system has had both negative and positive consequences. On the negative side, it has encouraged coalition politics, and coalition politics conducted in the absence of a healthy coalition culture has generated party paralysis, an increased role of money and muscle power, the politicisation of the office of the Speaker, and the decline of Parliament as a deliberative body. On the positive side, regionalisation has made Indian democracy more representative, drawing into the political mainstream groups and regions that were earlier marginal; and it has strengthened the federal axis of the Indian political system, enhancing the bargaining power of state governments in relation to the centre. It has also meant that regional issues increasingly dominate over national concerns and that states claim a greater role even in the conduct of foreign policy. The federalising impulse of Indian politics has thus been a double-edged development: it has deepened democracy and decentralised power, but it has also complicated governance and weakened the integrative authority of national institutions.

The Third Front and the New Party Type

Within this regionalised and coalitional landscape, the Third Front has emerged as a recurring feature of Indian politics. The Third Front refers to temporary alliances, beginning in 1989, among smaller and mostly regional parties offering a third option to voters who wish to reject both the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Such fronts are usually formed before elections, but they may also be constituted after elections in order to take advantage of a fractured mandate. The Third Front is a fluid category: its composition keeps changing, and it has no permanent leadership or programme. Yet it is not insignificant, for it commands a substantial share of the popular vote and possesses dominant presence in several states, and since it represents the OBCs, Muslims, Dalits and other marginalised sections, it remains a standing possibility of Indian politics. In 1989, the National Front, led by the Janata Dal, presented itself as an alternative to the Congress and the BJP and formed a government between 1989 and 1990. In 1996, a thirteen-party United Front, bringing together the Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party, the DMK, the Telugu Desam Party and the Asom Gana Parishad among others, formed two short-lived governments, the first under H.D. Deve Gowda and the second under I.K. Gujral, both of which rested upon outside support from the Congress. For the 2009 election, the CPI(M) sought to lead another Third Front of parties outside both the UPA and the NDA, including the BSP, the AIADMK, the BJD and the TDP; the alliance held 109 seats before the election but won only 82. In the 2019 election, the Mahagathbandhan brought together an even wider range of parties including the Congress itself, yet proved ineffective in influencing the outcome. The customary criticisms of such fronts are that they contain too many leaders, that they are animated by opportunism, that they are too parochial in outlook, that they lack a nationalist agenda, and that they are often negative coalitions formed against something rather than for anything positive.

A different kind of party has appeared in the form of the Aam Aadmi Party, which may be understood as a byproduct of globalisation. The AAP phenomenon is not unique to India: parallel examples include the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the Syriza party in Greece, the Workers' Party in Brazil, and the people's movements of Hong Kong. Globalisation has increased inequalities, and it has also intensified democratic consciousness and the demand for good governance. The AAP was formed in 2012 out of the anti-corruption movement, and it presents itself as anti-politics and anti-ideology, opposed to power politics as ordinarily practised. Its leaders declare that they have entered politics not for power but for change, and that they require power in order to change the system from within, since pressure from outside has proved ineffective. The party rejects the high-command culture of the older parties, adopts a bottom-up approach, and insists upon intraparty democracy: no two members of the same family may contest elections or serve on the executive council, and members possess the right to recall members of the executive council. Whether such experiments can be sustained beyond their founding generation, and whether they can escape the very pathologies of leadership and power that they set out to abolish, remains one of the open questions of the evolving party system.

Milan Vaishnav has observed that the rise of regional political parties is an eternal theme of Indian politics, a permanent feature rather than a passing phase. Regional parties operate within a limited geographic area and draw upon language, minority religion and regional culture as their bases of support; their number in India is much larger than in most political systems because of the immense variety of the country's social and linguistic composition. Sudha Pai has insisted that regional parties are rooted in the regional ground and should not be seen merely as a byproduct of regionalism, but as a phenomenon in their own right, the product of linguistic reorganisation, the decline of the Congress system and uneven development across regions. The electoral scale of this system was registered in the 2024 general election, in which the electorate numbered approximately 97.7 crore, the votes polled approximately 64.5 crore, and the turnout stood at 66 per cent, figures that make the Indian party system the largest democratic exercise of its kind in the world.

Regional Parties

The rise of the right in Indian politics is now beyond dispute. The Bharatiya Janata Party's parliamentary strength grew from a mere two seats in 1984 to 282 seats in 2014 and 303 seats in 2019, an ascent without parallel in the history of independent India. Thomas Blom Hansen, in his book The Saffron Wave, set out to explain this phenomenal rise of the BJP and of the forces of Hindutva, treating it not as a fleeting electoral surge but as a deep current in the political life of the nation. Milan Vaishnav likewise suggests that a big change has occurred in the electoral behaviour of the Indian people. For a long time, Indian politics was conducted upon the agreed agenda of secularism and of attention to minorities. The present politics represents a double rejection: a rejection of minoritism and of the Congress version of secularism, coupled with an assertion of majoritarianism that is combined with a demand for good governance and development. The electorate, in other words, has not merely changed its preferred party; it has changed the terms upon which it evaluates the parties that seek its vote.

The BJP: Lineage and Ideological Foundations

The BJP is the successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, formed in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, with Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya as its other principal architect and thinker. The Jana Sangh believed that a strong opposition was necessary for the health of democracy and sought to mount a serious challenge to the Nehruvian consensus that had framed the politics of the first republic. The Jana Sangh was a constituent of the Janata Party government formed after the Emergency, but in 1980, over disputes concerning association with the RSS and the policy of secularism, the Jana Sangh members came out of the Janata Party and formed the Bharatiya Janata Party on 6 April 1980. In doing so they carried forward an ideological inheritance combining cultural nationalism, Gandhian socialism and what the party calls positive secularism. The positive secularism of the BJP differs from the secularism of the Congress and from the hostility of the Hindu Mahasabha towards minorities: it aims at giving equal protection to all religions, on the premise that the state should neither privilege nor persecute any faith but should maintain an equal distance that permits every religion to flourish.

The philosophical core of the party's worldview was supplied by Deendayal Upadhyaya. Upadhyaya argued that western ideas are not suitable for India because they have not been part of India's history; India should adopt modern science and technology but not the western way of life. He pointed to Japan as an example of a society that modernised without adopting western culture, preserving its own traditions while acquiring industrial power. The philosophy he propounded, Integral Humanism, is founded upon the Indian way of life and conceives of the human being as an integrated totality of mind, body and soul. Politics, on this view, cannot be reduced to the pursuit of material interest; it must answer to the deeper spiritual and cultural needs of the community, and the nation is understood not as a contractual association of individuals but as an organic cultural and civilisational whole. Integral Humanism thus supplied the BJP with a home-grown ideology distinct from both the western liberalism of the Congress and the imported doctrines of the left.

Explaining the BJP's Rise

Hansen is careful to insist that the rise of the BJP is neither a purely religious phenomenon nor a strictly political one. It is occurring against the backdrop of the democratic transformation of the country. As lower castes and OBCs mobilise themselves politically, the amorphous Indian middle class becomes anxious about its status and prerogatives, and is drawn towards a party that promises order, stability and national pride. Even sections of the lower-caste Hindu poor have been attracted to the BJP's majoritarian rhetoric, which has been constructed in the name of nationalism, cultural pride, order, development and leadership. The decline of the Congress left voters with, in effect, two options: the left and the right. But the left ideology lacked imagination and the left lacked leadership, so that the right appeared to many to be the better option from every perspective. There was also a genuine sense of insecurity among many Hindus who perceived Congress policies as minority appeasement; the Congress, once the great umbrella party spanning the whole of Indian society, had been reduced in popular perception to the status of a party of minorities.

A cluster of additional factors consolidated the BJP's rise. The decline of the Congress removed the great centrist force that had contained both extremes. The demise of the left closed off the alternative pole of opposition. The BJP possessed organisational strength reaching down to the grassroots, built through decades of disciplined cadre work and the network of affiliated organisations of the Sangh Parivar. Its nationalistic rhetoric gave it a framework within which diverse grievances could be articulated. Globalisation also played a role: the Indian diaspora, particularly non-resident Indians, extended huge support to the BJP's policies and projected a resurgent India abroad; globalisation has everywhere given rise to ethnic politics and the strengthening of religious identity; and the rising fear of Islamic fundamentalism in the post-Cold War world turned many voters towards a party perceived as decisively nationalist and Hindu. The BJP's economic policy was aligned with the current of globalisation, appealing to the aspirations of a growing middle class. And it possessed something the opposition conspicuously lacked: strong, decisive and continuous leadership. The combined effect was to make the BJP, within a single generation, the natural party of government in Indian politics, bringing the long era of coalition politics to a halt.

The Decline of the Left

The other side of the rise of the right has been the collapse of the left. Praful Bidwai, in his book Phoenix Movement, argues that the decline of the Indian left is an old story, and that what is surprising is not that it has declined but that it ever persisted. It is remarkable that the left in India could never take root despite the prevalence of mass poverty, which should, on classical Marxist reasoning, have produced a powerful workers' and peasants' movement. It is equally remarkable that the youth of India, which in most countries furnishes the left with its recruits, has been attracted towards the right rather than the left. The left was initially the major opposition to the Congress, and in the early decades its vote share was double that of the Jana Sangh. Today the situation is inverted: the right is in a position to form governments on its own, while the left has been reduced to the margins of the party system. The 2019 election was the worst in the electoral history of the Indian left, which managed only five seats and a vote share of 2.33 per cent, against the 64 seats it had captured at its high point in 2004. In 2024 the left appears to have stalled an imminent collapse, winning eight seats across the country, with the CPI(M) taking four, the CPI two and the CPI(ML) Liberation two, and its vote share rising marginally to 2.52 per cent; but the difference between revival and stabilisation at a low plateau remains to be seen.

Bidwai and other analysts have catalogued the reasons for this marginalisation. Because of their shifting stands during the Indian freedom struggle, the left could never fully gain the trust of the Indian masses. Neither then nor now has the left presented a serious understanding of the peculiar circumstances of Indian politics, remaining dependent upon imported doctrines instead of developing an indigenous analysis. The principle of democratic centralism, which discourages dissent and internal debate, weakened the left, and the Indian left reproduced the high-command culture it criticised in other parties. Left leaders lacked grassroots bases, most having been recruited from universities rather than from movements. The left's agenda was successively appropriated by others: the Congress took over the Indian form of socialism, and the AAP took over the role of a new left, leaving the older left parties without a distinctive political space. There was a lack of internal solidarity among the various left parties, which fought each other as much as their common opponents. The essential genius of left politics, the politics of social movements and radical democracy, was abandoned as the left confined itself to electoral politics and to the pursuit of governmental office. Despite its theoretical rejection of identity politics, the Indian left itself practised the politics of religion and caste rather than the politics of class and development. Globalisation made left ideology appear redundant: it did not meet the ambitions and aspirations of the educated Indian youth, and it created a footloose workforce that is extraordinarily difficult to organise into trade unions. The left's foreign policy was equally redundant, consisting of anti-globalisation, anti-Americanism and a pro-Chinese posture, while its claim to be the true heir of non-alignment merely inherited, without renewing, the foreign policy framework of the Congress. And the left lost its great stronghold of West Bengal because, while in power, it used force against its own constituency and favoured its adversarial class, the corporate class, in pursuit of industrial investment.

The Indian left, if it is to recover, requires introspection. It would be far better served by returning to the original idea of left politics: the politics of social movements, radical democracy, the organisation of the exploited sections of society and the patient work for their rights. The lesson of the BJP's rise and the left's decline is that parties prosper when they speak to the lived anxieties and aspirations of the people, and that a politics which confines itself to electoral calculation, imported doctrine or the defence of inherited positions will, sooner or later, be swept aside by a politics which addresses the deeper currents of the democratic transformation.

Coalition Politics

Coalition government is a characteristic feature of the parliamentary form of government. It emerges in a situation of a hung assembly or parliament, when no single party commands a majority on its own and the government must be constructed by agreement among two or more parties. William Riker has explained the coalition as a power-sharing arrangement, a formulation that captures both the essence and the difficulty of the enterprise: coalitions are formed because power must be shared between parties that, left to themselves, would prefer not to share it at all. Coalition government is not unique to India. It is a regular feature of the political systems of continental Europe, and among European countries, the coalition culture of Italy most closely resembles India's experience of coalition politics.

Nor is coalition politics new to India. Coalition governments were formed in the provinces as early as 1937, in the era of provincial autonomy under the Government of India Act. The Congress itself was a grand coalition, a party within which every significant social interest and ideological tendency of the national movement was accommodated. The Janata Party that came to power in 1977 was itself a coalition of many non-Congress parties. What changed from 1989 onwards is that coalition politics became a regular feature of the national level, displacing single-party government. At the state level, however, coalition government had been a regular feature since the fourth general elections of 1967, and the coalition politics of the states has on the whole been more mature and more stable than coalition politics at the union level. Kerala and West Bengal offer the best Indian examples of a mature coalition culture, in which alliances have persisted over long periods and have become the settled form of political competition rather than improvised arrangements for office.

Bidyut Chakrabarty on the Indian Coalition

Bidyut Chakrabarty has drawn a series of instructive contrasts between coalition politics in the West and the coalition experience of India. In the western countries, coalitions are coalitions by design: they are planned, deliberate arrangements built according to understood principles of government formation. In India, by contrast, coalitions are coalitions by political calculation, formed out of the immediate necessities of the electoral or parliamentary arithmetic, and they are still searching for a design that can give them permanent shape. Western coalitions are power-sharing arrangements in which the parties seek the minimum winning coalition, the smallest combination of parties that commands a majority, so that the fruits of office can be distributed among as few claimants as possible. In India, oversized coalitions have been the norm, governments bringing together many more parties than the minimum necessary for a majority, in order to broaden their social base and to insulate themselves against defection. Western coalitions are formed on the basis of ideological convergence; parties that share a common worldview come together. In India, rainbow coalitions have been formed, bringing together parties of sharply different and even opposed ideologies, held together not by shared principles but by the shared desire for office or the shared fear of an opponent. Negative coalitions have accordingly been a regular feature of Indian politics: coalitions are formed not so much to run the government as to stop someone else from coming to power, and once that negative objective is achieved, the solidarity of the coalition becomes difficult to maintain, since there is little positive ideological coherence to bind the partners. The Janata government of 1977 and the INDIA alliance of 2024 exemplify this negative character. Finally, the core party in Indian coalitions has not followed the practice of consulting its partners; the dominant partner tends to make decisions and present them to the coalition as a fait accompli, breeding resentment and instability.

The Negative Consequences of Coalition Politics

The problem does not lie in coalition government as such; it lies in India's coalition culture. Where the culture of alliance is underdeveloped, coalition politics produces a distinctive catalogue of pathologies: policy paralysis, as governments become unable to take decisions that might offend any partner; the decline of Parliament as a deliberative forum, since policy is negotiated outside it among party leaders; the decline of the office and dignity of the Speaker, whose neutrality is compromised by the exigencies of the ruling coalition; the rise of judicial activism and presidential activism, as the political executive's weakness draws other institutions into the vacuum; frequent elections and premature dissolutions; horse trading and defection, as legislators change parties in pursuit of office; an increasing role of money and muscle power; the increasing use of ethnic mobilisation to shore up the electoral base of coalition partners; the weakening of the institution of the Prime Minister, so that in a coalition there are effectively more than one prime ministers, each faction regarding its own leader as the true head of government and the actual incumbent as merely the manager of the coalition; and a general increase in corruption, as the price of maintaining a coalition rises with every bargain that must be struck.

The deeper question is whether coalition is avoidable in a country like India. The answer is that it is not: a country of India's immense diversity, federal structure and multi-party democracy will recurrently produce hung parliaments and coalition governments. The important task, therefore, is not to debate the desirability of coalition but to think about how to make coalition work. Coalition itself is not bad. Coalition government makes democracy more representative and consociational, giving different communities and regions a share in power. But if the coalition does not possess a healthy coalition culture, it may impact the national interest of the country, as stability, decisiveness and long-term policy are sacrificed to the exigencies of alliance management. The challenge is to cultivate the norms, institutions and practices that convert coalition government from a source of instability into a settled and workable form of governance.

Making Coalitions Work: The German and Japanese Lessons

India can learn useful lessons from countries such as Germany, which exhibit a sound coalition culture, and can incorporate some of their features rather than basing the Indian parliamentary system entirely upon the Westminster model. In Germany, the Chancellor enjoys a stronger status than the Prime Minister of the British model. The principal problem of coalition politics is political instability, and the German system addresses it through the constructive vote of no-confidence, under which a government can be removed only if a successor government has already been agreed upon; a mere vote of no-confidence without an alternative government is constitutionally ineffective. This dramatically raises the cost of defection and instability. India could also consider the Japanese model, in which the Prime Minister is elected by the members of the lower house, giving the head of government a parliamentary mandate that is less easily destabilised by coalition partners. The shift to a Chancellor-style model is particularly apt for coalition conditions, because in coalition politics the position of the Prime Minister becomes weak; coalition partners acquire huge bargaining power, and the role of the Prime Minister is reduced to that of a manager of the coalition rather than a leader of the government. In the Chancellor system this is avoided: the Chancellor determines the policy direction of the different departments, the ministries are required to work according to the policy so directed, and the cabinet system comes into play only when there is a conflict between two ministries that requires collective resolution.

The former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh used to lament that India lacks coalition dharma, that is, the ethos and discipline of coalition governance. To cultivate that ethos, India should institutionalise the practice of steering committees and regular consultative mechanisms in which all members of the coalition participate. If the core party practises greater transparency, there will be less scope for bargaining by smaller parties, since decisions will not be taken behind closed doors where leverage is exercised privately. There is also a need to reform the anti-defection laws, so that coalition partners cannot be destabilised by the poaching of legislators. Mechanisms must be strengthened to check corruption among members of Parliament, electoral reform is needed to reduce the influence of money and muscle power and of caste and religion in Indian politics, and, above all, there is a need to introduce ethics into politics. A coalition system without coalition culture will always be a system of instability; a coalition system with a developed culture of accommodation, consultation and transparency can become a mature and representative form of democratic government, and it is the task of institutional design and of political leadership to bring that culture into being.

Pressure Groups

Pressure groups have come to be known as the invisible empires of politics, the organised but often unpublicised formations through which interests press their claims upon the state without themselves seeking to capture governmental office. They are considered an integral component of pluralist democracies, for they give institutional expression to the diversity of social interests that single parties, with their aggregative functions, cannot fully represent. Every democracy recognises the freedom to form associations as a fundamental political right, and it is upon this freedom that the entire edifice of pressure group politics rests. Pressure group politics is most influential in the United States, where the separation of powers and the weakness of party discipline create multiple points of access through which organised interests can influence legislation and administration. Pressure groups are far less powerful in countries where political parties represent specific ideologies, as in Britain, where the Labour Party is assumed to work in the interest of the working class and thereby absorbs, within the party system, conflicts that elsewhere find expression through pressure groups.

In India, pressure groups have historically not played as effective a role as in the United States. One of the earliest scholarly studies of pressure group politics in India was undertaken by Rajni Kothari, who analysed the Indian party system and the place of organised interests within it. Kothari's central insight was that the dominant status of the Congress did not allow pressure groups to gain primacy: with the Congress as a party of consensus absorbing a vast range of interests within its own coalitional structure, pressure groups remained weak, and other political parties were themselves reduced to the status of pressure groups, operating at the margins of the dominant party's space. It was for this reason that Kothari called the opposition parties the parties of pressure. Within the Indian context, Kothari also observed that communal pressure groups were more dominant than other kinds of organised interests, and that pressure groups in general did not enjoy much legitimacy in the eyes of the people. He nonetheless regarded pressure groups as agents of modernisation and as reservoirs of leadership, performing a positive function in channelling social energies into the political process. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph subsequently analysed the role of caste associations, showing how ostensibly traditional institutions were transformed into modern instruments of political mobilisation and interest articulation. Myron Weiner, in his book Politics and Scarcity, highlighted the role of communal pressure groups and their connection to the politics of scarcity and distribution. Christophe Jaffrelot has studied the role of the RSS in Indian politics, treating the Sangh as a distinctive form of pressure group whose influence pervades culture, education and the organisation of social life, and which acts as the ideological powerhouse of the wider Sangh Parivar. Professor Anand Chakravarty has argued that the Government of India should have shown greater accommodation towards pressure groups, since many pressure groups were banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act; had the government accommodated them politically, it would have been easier to address the alienation and secessionist trends that arose in parts of the country, for organisations that are driven underground do not cease to exist but lose the moderating discipline of open political participation.

The Changing Nature of Pressure Groups in India

Robert Hardgrave and Stanley Kochanek have highlighted the changing nature of pressure groups in India. Since the 1990s, pressure group politics in India has been shifting from state-dominated pluralism to a more powerful and autonomous pressure group politics. The process of liberalisation and globalisation has given pressure groups a new legitimacy: as the state retreated from direct control of the economy, organised interests acquired greater room to operate, and the government increasingly incorporated different interest groups into the very institutions of policy making. Bodies such as the National Advisory Council, the National Security Advisory Board and now the NITI Aayog have drawn civil society and expert opinion into the policy process, institutionalising a consultative relationship between the state and organised interests that was earlier largely absent. There has been a substantial increase in the power of business groups, which now participate not only in domestic policy making but also in the conduct of international economic diplomacy; business groups are regularly part of the delegations that accompany the government on foreign visits, and the tradition of organising parallel business summits alongside political summits has become a regular feature of India's engagement with the world. Foreign lobbies and advocacy groups likewise exercise greater pressure and influence than before, so that Indian policy making now takes place within a transnational field of organised interests.

At the same time, the older patterns persist. Communal pressure groups, the pressure groups of the corporate sector and the organised lobbies of rich farmers continue to play a dominant role in Indian politics. India still does not possess a dominant women's organisation comparable to the mass organisations of some other countries. Environmental lobbies, student unions and trade unions continue to function largely as junior partners of political parties rather than as independent centres of pressure, and many pressure groups, primarily of the left wing, have been banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The state, moreover, continues to be the dominant actor in India, and at times it has not been tolerant towards certain pressure groups: a highly disputed report of the Intelligence Bureau pointed out that many NGOs were engaged in anti-national propaganda and that their activities had been detrimental to India's growth. The picture that emerges is of a pressure group system in transition: the liberalising economy and the globalising polity have created new space for organised interests, particularly business, professional and advocacy groups, while the older balance of state dominance, party mediation and communal mobilisation remains substantially intact, and the boundary between legitimate interest articulation and alleged sedition continues to be drawn and redrawn by a state suspicious of organisations it cannot control.

Electoral Behaviour

The study of electoral behaviour is a product of the behavioural movement in political science, which shifted the discipline's attention from the formal institutions of government to the actual conduct of voters, parties and elites as they could be observed and measured. The application of the behavioural approach to India is, however, a challenging task. Milan Vaishnav has observed that the study of electoral behaviour in India is difficult because of the sheer size and diversity of the electorate, which makes generalisation hazardous. There is also the more fundamental problem posed by Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem: Arrow demonstrated that, under plausible conditions, it is impossible to derive a coherent social preference from the individual preferences of voters when they have more than three choices to rank. If this is true even in the abstract, then the attempt to read a clear popular mandate out of the results of an election involving dozens of parties and thousands of candidates is theoretically fraught. Yet India remains an interesting case study of electoral behaviour precisely because it defies the expectations that flow from such theoretical pessimism. It presents a big puzzle: why do Indians vote at all, and why do they vote in such enormous numbers, when despite voting, nothing seems to get translated into concrete achievements in governance and development for the ordinary citizen? The puzzle of high turnout in circumstances of low performance is one of the abiding questions of Indian political science.

Why Indians Vote: The Evidence of Ethnography

Mukulika Banerjee and her team conducted an ethnographic survey of Indian voters that sought to answer this question from the ground up. The survey produced a series of striking findings about the meaning that voters attach to the act of voting. Many voters consider the act of voting to be an assertion of their citizenship, a performance of both their rights and their duties as members of the republic. Elections are understood as the moment of power inversion, the one occasion on which the ordinary citizen, who is otherwise at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, stands for a moment above the powerful, commanding their deference and attention. People believe that it is better to choose and to reject those who govern them, that even an imperfect power of dismissal is preferable to none. Some vote out of a feeling of revenge against those who have misused power. Some vote because a member of their own caste or community is contesting, and the act of voting is an affirmation of group solidarity. Some vote because they believe the Election Commission is doing a great job and they wish to honour the institution that makes their power real. Some vote because they believe the edifice of Indian democracy would collapse otherwise, that their participation is essential to the persistence of the system itself. And some even consider voting a sacred duty, an obligation whose discharge carries moral and almost religious weight. The survey thereby revealed what the formal models of electoral choice miss: that for the Indian voter, voting is not merely a strategic act of preference aggregation but a dense cultural practice through which citizenship, dignity, community and nationhood are simultaneously enacted.

The study also produced the counter-intuitive finding that the poor are more sophisticated and strategic voters than the rich. Poor people have a higher dependency on government welfare provisions, and precisely because their livelihood depends upon the state, they have learned to weigh the promises and performances of parties and candidates with great care. They have been found to be more aware of, and to understand better, the value of their vote than the educated middle classes, who vote not in expectation of anything in return but as a duty towards the nation. The common assumption that education and income produce more discerning voters is thus inverted by the Indian evidence: those who have the most at stake in the distributive decisions of the state are the most attentive and the most strategic in their use of the franchise.

Structural Trends and the Maturity of the Indian Voter

The survey research of the Lokniti programme, operating as part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, has identified the longer-term structural trends in Indian electoral behaviour. Caste and religion remain the major long-term determinants of electoral choice, shaping the base of party support in ways that short-term campaign effects rarely disturb. Yet, in a striking finding, corruption and anti-incumbency do not appear to matter as much as the retrospective theories of voting would predict: voters who punish the corrupt and the incumbents are the exception rather than the rule. And there is little difference in the electoral preferences of men and women or of rural and urban voters, so that the standard sociological cleavages of gender and residence do not, in the Indian case, map onto clear differences of party choice. Yogendra Yadav has characterised the deeper movement of Indian politics as a shift from identity politics to identity-plus politics: voters have not abandoned caste and community identity as the basis of political choice, but they have increasingly combined identity with an insistence upon development and governance, so that the successful party must now satisfy the demands of both recognition and distribution.

Prannoy Roy, Ashok Lahiri and David Butler, in their compendium of Indian elections, concluded that the voting behaviour of Indians is many times more mature than the voting behaviour of voters in western countries, a judgement based on the consistency, discrimination and responsiveness that Indian voters have displayed across successive elections. M.P. Singh has argued that the credit for the success of India's democracy belongs to the great common sense shown by ordinary voters. No election verdict in India, on this view, has ever been wrong; voters have always opted for the best possible option available to them, and the recurrent stability of the system, through crises that have destroyed democracies elsewhere, is the proof of their political maturity. The conclusion that emerges from the study of Indian electoral behaviour is that the voter, far from being the passive subject of manipulation by parties, caste leaders and money power, is an active, intelligent and increasingly sophisticated political actor, whose participation, in such vast numbers and with such evident seriousness, is the deepest foundation of the Indian democratic experiment.

Profile of Legislators

Parliament is a mirror of society. The profile of Parliament, the social composition of its members, gives valuable indications about the nature of a society and the direction in which it is changing. Who sits in the legislature reveals whose interests are represented, which groups have access to power, and how the balance of social forces is shifting over time. In the Indian case, there is no significant difference between the profile of members of Parliament and members of state legislatures, nor between the profile of members of the upper house and the lower house; the same social forces that shape the Lok Sabha shape the Rajya Sabha and the state assemblies alike. Shankar and Rodrigues have divided the changing profile of Indian legislators into three phases, each corresponding to a distinct stage in the evolution of Indian democracy.

In the first phase, the phase of the nationalist elite, the profile of Parliament reflected the social composition of the independence movement. In terms of caste, Brahmins dominated the legislature, while the Other Backward Classes, women and minorities were markedly under-represented. The one partial exception was the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, whose reserved seats ensured a presence in Parliament roughly proportional to their share of the population; reservation, rather than open competition, was the mechanism that secured their entry. In terms of education, the members were overwhelmingly graduates, and a notably large proportion had studied in foreign universities; this held true even among the members drawn from the Scheduled Caste community, who had, in significant numbers, been educated abroad. In terms of profession, lawyers were the largest group, followed by agriculturalists. Parliament in this phase was an assembly of the educated, professional and largely upper-caste elite that had led the national movement, and the questions of representation that would later dominate Indian politics had not yet been posed with full force.

The second phase, the phase of transition, was brought about by the state reorganisation, the Green Revolution and the deepening of democracy. These processes produced a rise of the intermediate castes, a phenomenon described by Yogendra Yadav as the first democratic upsurge, in which the lower and intermediate castes, mobilised through agrarian prosperity and the political space created by the reorganisation of the states, entered the political arena in large numbers. In this phase, the OBCs became the most dominant section of the legislature. In terms of profession, agriculturalists now formed the majority, followed by members drawn from social service; the earlier pattern, in which professionals entered politics from established careers, gave way to a new pattern in which politics became a full-time profession and a source of livelihood. The trend began under the influence of the Jayaprakash Narayan movement and the Sanjay Gandhi Youth Congress, which drew young people into politics at the moment of career formation, so that politics became for them not a retirement from a profession but the profession itself. The number of graduates from foreign universities declined sharply in this phase. Yet nothing changed with respect to the representation of minorities and women: the representation of women stagnated at around 8 to 10 per cent of the total seats, and the under-representation of minorities persisted.

The third phase, the phase of plebeianisation, has been explained by Yogendra Yadav through the term the second democratic upsurge, in which the lower classes, the Dalits and the most marginalised sections entered politics as active and assertive participants. Parliament in this phase continues to be dominated by the OBCs, and in terms of profession, by agriculturalists and social workers. There has been little change with respect to women and minority representation, which remains stuck at the same modest levels. The number of graduates has, however, increased, so that the educational level of members has risen even as their social origins have become more plebeian. And since the 1990s, Parliament has witnessed an increasing presence of persons with criminal backgrounds, a phenomenon known as the criminalisation of Indian politics, in which candidates with pending criminal cases have come to constitute a substantial and growing proportion of legislators. The profile of Parliament has thus moved from an elite assembly of nationalist professionals, through a transitional assembly dominated by the agrarian intermediate castes, to a plebeian assembly in which the lower orders of society are represented in numbers, but which is shadowed by the growing entanglement of politics with crime and money. The mirror that Parliament holds up to Indian society reflects both the remarkable democratisation of the country, the entry into power of groups that were for centuries excluded, and the unresolved problems of gender, minority representation and the criminalisation of public life.