EDITORIALS & ARTICLES
India has moved from ‘one-party dominant system' to 'one-party led coalition'. Discuss. (UPSC CSE Mains 2017 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- The Indian party system has evolved through the following four phases. The first phase, 1952-67, consisted of the first four general elections of 1952, 1957, 1962 and 1967 with which most State Assembly elections coincided. It was characterised by comfortable majorities — two-thirds majorities of seats in the first three elections — won by the Congress based on pluralities of 44-48% votes in the first three of these against a fragmented and disunited opposition. The same pattern was repeated simultaneously in nearly all the States. However, in 1967 though the Congress won a majority with just over 40% of the votes, and saw a consolidation of opposition parties from then onwards in more and more States.
- The second phase, 1967-89, saw the consolidation of the opposition vote behind some single major opposition party or coalition, State by State, for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, particularly the latter, leading increasingly to the bipolarisation of State-level party systems into one of the following patterns: a two-party system, one party versus a coalition, or two opposed coalitions, with third and lesser parties playing a minor role. This bipolarisation of State-level party systems, thus strengthening a variety of opposition parties across States, was the driving force of the fragmentation of the Congress-dominated national party system.
- However, this bipolarisation trend was one of multiple bipolarities — the Congress versus the Bharatiya Jan Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party (BJS/BJP) in some States (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi) from 1967, the Congress versus the Left in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, the Congress versus a regional party in Tamil Nadu and Punjab from 1967, in Andhra Pradesh from 1984, in Assam from 1985, to name prominent cases.
- By 1989, the classic Congress system of hegemonic dominance against a fragmented opposition at the State level remained in place only in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Odisha. However, despite bipolarisation and the rise of a range of national (BJP, Left) and regional opposition parties in a range of States – and regional and Left parties forming governments in such States — the Congress continued to win majorities based on vote share pluralities in general elections during this phase except for the 1989 election (and except for the exceptional, post-Emergency 1977 election when the Janata Party, a merger of five opposition parties, won a Congress-like victory in reverse, i.e. a majority based on a vote share plurality).
- The third phase, 1989-2014, particularly 1996-2014, was one of no single party getting a majority and consequently of coalition and/or minority governments (coalitions from 1996 to 2014 were minority coalitions dependent on outside support) at the Centre with major participation by regional parties both in governing coalitions directly and as external supporters. During this phase, the Duvergerian dynamic of bipolarisation at the State level continued to play itself out in more and more States such that almost all except notably U.P. became bipolar party systems by 2014. However, in this phase the Congress vote share plurality, which continued in all elections from 1989 to 2009, no longer converted into a majority of seats, leading to the formation of non-single party majority governments throughout this 25-year phase.
- The fourth phase in the evolution of the party system at the national level is the new BJP-led one-party dominant system that has emerged since 2014, with the BJP, helped by pre-electoral coalitions, winning seat majorities of 282 and 303 seats, respectively, in 2014 and 2019, based on 31% and 37% vote share, the 2014 figure being the highest vote-to-seat conversion ratio of 1.65 (52% seats for 31% votes) in any Indian election to date.
- This new one-party dominance of the BJP has not yet reached the level of hegemony enjoyed by the Congress in its four-decade (except for the Janata Party period) dominance by three measures. First, the BJP has not crossed the 40% vote share mark which the Congress never fell below till 1989 with the exception of 1977. Second, the BJP’s dominance is not yet the case in almost all States unlike the Congress in its heyday, never having won in four southern and two eastern States and one northwestern State on its own. Third, the BJP majorities in 2014 and 2019 were partly dependent on vote transfers from pre-electoral allies in key States (of the 303 seats it won in 2019, 42 were from Maharashtra, Bihar and Punjab, fought in alliance with key partner parties).
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