Congress Decline and Party Pluralism in India

Author(s): Christopher Candland

Source: Journal of International Affairs , Summer 1997, Vol. 51, No. 1, South Asia: The
Challenges of Statehood (Summer 1997), pp. 19-35
Published by: Journal of International Affairs Editorial Board

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 Con gress Decline and Party
Pluralism in India

Christopher Candland1

Thepetition
Indian the
National
BritishCongress party
government was founded
in India in 1885
for administrative
and political reform. Under British rule, the Congress gained ex
perience in contesting elections and in governing at provincial
and municipal levels. In the 1920s, Mohandas Gandhi reorga
nized the party, which helped it to evolve into one of the world's

Throughout South Asia, the national political

parties that led independence movements tended
to dominate government in the formative years
of independence only to give way to
increasingly agrarian, confessional,
regional and vernacular political parties.

largest membership-based, mass organizations. Principled and

well-organized resistance to British rule confirmed the Congress
as the party of Indian national independence. As the Second
World War weakened Britain's colonial grip, the Congress was
invited to take charge of the central government, almost a year
before independence in August 1947.2 The Congress has been

I thank Grace Kim, Philip Oldenburg, Mia Son, David Stuligross and Arun Swamy
for their generous help.
The British Viceroy invited the Congress to form an Interim Government. After
some debate within the Congress, the party accepted. Significantly, the Viceroy did
not invite an elected legislator from the Central Legislative Assembly, but rather
invited Jawaharlal Nehru, president of the Indian National Congress to form the
Interim Government. The basis of this decision was the Congress's strong perfor
mance in the 1945/46 provincial council elections. See Robin Jeffrey, "The Prime
Minister and the Ruling Party," in James Manor, ed., Nehru to the Nineties: The
Changing Office of Prime Minister in India (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 1994) pp. 163-165. Nehru resigned his position as Congress president,
foreseeing a conflict between the Congress organization and the Congress in gov
ernment. See further Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: The Dynamics
of One-Party Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968) pp. 4-5.

Journal of International Affairs, Summer 1997, 51, no. 1. © The Trustees of Columbia
University in the City of New York.

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 Journal of International Affairs

the party in government at the national level, or the center, for

all but six years since India's independence, 50 years ago.3
Today, however, the Congress is out of power and, for the
first time since independence, it is not the party with the greatest
number of seats in the Lok Sabha (People's Council), the popu
larly elected house of Parliament.4 The Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) occupies the larg
est block of seats. Twenty-eight parties are represented in Parlia
ment, the largest number in independent India's history. A coa
lition of 13 regional and left parties, the United Front, presently
governs at the center.5
The Indian National Congress has been the most impor
intro/conclusion tant institution in India's modern political development. The
Congress, a favorite example of a dominant party in a competi
tive party system, was thought to be the backbone of the devel
oping world's best institutionalized democracy.6 Today, the Con
gress is seemingly in advanced stages of decline. Each of the non
Congress parties, including those presently in government at the
center and in most states, represent more focused interests than
the Congress can seemingly retain. Moreover, many suggest that
the Indian political system is being destabilized by rising social
unrest and institutional decay.7 That sentiment is buttressed by
the increased electoral support to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
in past parliamentary elections and in a number of significant
state assembly elections.8 Some have cautioned that the new so

The Congress was in power at the center from independence in August 1947 to
March 1977, from May 1980 to November 1989, and from June 1991 to May
1996.
The Indian Parliament is comprised of an upper house, the Rajya Sabha (States'
Council) and lower house, Lok Sabha (People's Council).
On 28 March 1997, the chief of Congress' Parliamentary Party, Sitaram Kesri,
withdrew Congress support to the ruling coalition. H.D. Deve Gowda's replacement
by Inder Kumar Gujral at the head of the United Front coalition on 21 April 1997
has re-established the necessary support from the Congress.
See, for example, Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976) p. 124.
For comparative analysis of the falling performance of Indian political institutions
at district, state and national levels, see Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's
Growing Crisis of Govemability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Between the 1991 and the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP increased its share
of seats, from 119 to 161, but not its share of the electoral vote, which actually fell
below the 1991 level of 20.95 percent to 20.3 percent in 1996.

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 Christopher Candland

cial forces and popular demands that have lead to religious reviv
alist and to caste-oriented parties cannot be accommodated in a
parliamentary democracy.
The leadership, constituencies, issues and electoral strat
egies of political parties have undergone significant change in the
50 years since independence in India. Do these changes, most
notably the decline of the Congress, signal the arrival of more
pluralist politics in India? To advance upon this question, this
essay comments on the evolution of the Congress within the In
dian political party system.9 A brief assessment of the reasons for
and the depth of the Congress's decline suggests that the Indian
party system is neither in the midst of systemic crisis of gover
nance nor endangered by religious revivalism. Emergent forms of
electoral appeals and political contest may not quite conform to
the theoretical postulates of pluralism, but as the Indian elector
ate has broadened, the Indian Parliament and India's more than
two dozen state assemblies are becoming more representative of
Indian society as a whole, including its caste, class, religious and
other social cleavages.

Congress Dominance

The Congress ruled continuously at the center and in most

Indian states, from the first general election in 1952 until the 6th
general election in March 1977. The party has retained power
at the center more often than not since. However, the Congress
has been dominant not by virtue of its command of an undemo
cratic electoral system but rather by virtue of its depth of leader
ship and its organizational capacity. Although the Congress had
been the dominant party, it has not attempted to make itself into
an organization with an exclusive claim to governance, as have
Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revo
lutionary Party) and Indonesia's GOLKAR. Strongly competi
tive multi-party elections have been regularly held in India since
independence at national, state and local levels and electoral ver
dicts have been respected by unsuccessful incumbents.

For a thorough discussion of Indian democracy and development, see Jyotirindra

Das Gupta, "India: Democratic Becoming and Combined Development," in Larry
Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Democracy in Developing
Countries: Asia, vol. 3 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1989) pp. 53-104.

21

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Journal of International Affairs

In India's first-past-the-post system, elections do not yield

representation in proportion to votes received. The first-past
the-post electoral system entails that a candidate wins by ob
taining the greatest plurality of votes, not necessarily the major
ity of votes. An edge at the polls therefore can result in a large
majority of seats, especially if political parties divide constituen
cies among themselves, as they often do, rather than compete
with each other directly. Such no-contest alliances allow parties
to secure constituencies for which they might otherwise not have
the votes. Still, the Indian voter faces a wide array of candidates.
An average of 14 candidates ran in each constituency in the 1996
general election. Until that election, the Congress had consis
tently managed to appeal to enough voters to be just past the
post in most constituencies. Thus, even in the years of Congress
dominance, from 1952 to 1967, when the Congress held more
than 70 percent of the seats in parliament, the Congress never
received more than 50 percent of the vote in parliamentary or, in
aggregate, in state assembly elections.10 The Congress's dominance,
like the Congress's decline, has been exaggerated by the dispro
portionate results of the first-past-the-post electoral system.
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister from 1947 until
his death in 1964, the Congress commanded tremendous organi
zational capacity, relying on local, state and national level Con
gress committees and members and vast networks reaching across
more than a dozen European-sized states. It contested every
parliamentary constituency and almost every state assembly and
municipal constituency. The Congress was a well-organized party
with motivated party workers and an unusually effective leader
ship. In the estimation of Myron Weiner, a careful student of the
Congress, the party took seriously its "organizational problems"
and "its own rules and regulations."11 This allowed the Congress,
in the first two decades after independence, to incorporate indi
viduals with different political ideologies and constituencies. Until
1948 the Congress even permitted parties that had distinct orga
nizational structures and independent constitutional principles
to operate within the Congress organization.12

Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit o/Lakshmi: The Political Economy of
the Indian State (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1987) pp. 130-131.
Myron Weiner, Party Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress (Chi
cago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967) p. 461.
Craig Baxter, Yogendra Malik, Charles Kennedy and Robert Oberst, Ciovernment and
Politics in South Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) p. 101.
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 Christopher Candland

In its first two decades as a party in government, the Con

gress was remarkably adept at accommodating rival interests
outside the party and especially within it. According to Rajni
Kothari, another careful student of the organization, the Con
gress system was based upon factional alliances within the party
and between these party factions and non-party interest groups.
Kothari developed the concept of the Congress system to charac
terize the internal arrangement that permitted, during the first
two decades of independence, rival interests to exist and reach
compromises within the party.13 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
not only had a firm command on the organization, but also facili
tated the settling of factional conflicts within the party.
While the Congress was once "extraordinarily successful...
in recruiting new members, winning competitive elections and
avoiding fragmentation,"14 a conflict soon developed between the
Congress organization, including Congress office bearers, party
workers and dues-paying members of the party, on the one hand
and the Congress in government, comprised of only the elected
Congress members of Parliament and state assemblies, on the
other.15 As prime minister and head of the Congress in govern
ment, Nehru respected the independence of the Congress organi
zation and ensured that elections were held for party offices. The
succession struggle after Nehru's death in 1964 gave rise to open
conflict between the party organization and the party in govern
ment. Lai Bahadur Shastri was selected to succeed Nehru as
prime minister, but the succession struggle re-emerged with
Shastri's death in 1965.
A rift had developed between senior members of the Con
gress organization, known as the Syndicate and younger Con
gress leaders who wanted to quicken the pace of social transfor
mation. The Syndicate selected Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter,
Mrs. Gandhi, who had served as her father's advisor and in
Shastri's cabinet, to be prime minister. Meanwhile, the Congress
performed poorly in both the Lok Sabha and state assembly elec

13 Rajni Kothari, "Congress 'System' in India," Asm/i Survey, 4: 12, (December 1964)
pp. 1-18.
14 Weiner, p. i.
15 According to Stanley Kochanek, the Congress organization was under challenge as
soon as the Viceroy appointed a Congress Interim Government in September 1946.
Congress thereafter was forced to balance the interests of the national political
organization and of Congress legislators. Kochanek, pp. 3-26.

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Journal of International Affairs

tions in 1967. The Congress retained a majority of seats in Par

liament but lost most state assemblies. The Congress govern
ment at the center faced ruling opposition parties in eight states.
Factional leaders within the party defected and allied themselves
with opposition parties.16 The elections of 1967 seemed to be the
long-awaited death toll of the Congress. As Mrs. Gandhi sided
with the young Congress Socialists in important economic policy
resolutions and in her candidate for President of the Republic,
Mrs. Gandhi was expelled from the Congress causing it to split in
November 1969. Her faction, originally the Congress (R), later
to become the Congress (I), took with it 223 of the 283 Congress
members of the Lok Sabha.17
In the 1970s, Indira Gandhi turned the Congress into an
organization directed from the prime minister's office. With a
populist campaign based on the slogan garibi hatao (abolish pov
erty), Congress (R) performed very well in the 1971 general elec
tion, securing 352 of the 518 seats in Parliament and re-estab
lishing Congress governments in all but two states.18 Mrs. Gandhi
took personal control of Congress affairs, rather than allowing
conflicts to be resolved at lower levels as had Nehru. Decisions
about the selections of chief ministers and state cabinets "were
made by Mrs. Gandhi herself in consultation with a clique of
personal advisors."19 Mrs. Gandhi dismissed and appointed Con
gress chief ministers and exercised, through the Office of the Presi
dent, the government's prerogative to dismiss the opposition in
state assemblies. Article 352 of the Indian Constitution, "in case
of failure of constitutional machinery in States," allows the presi
dent, upon the advise of a state governor, who is appointed by
the center, to dismiss the chief minister and state assembly and

16 See further Kochanek, pp. 407-447.

17 The R originally stood for Requisitioned and later denoted Ruling. After a further
split in 1977, Congress (R) became Congress (I), where I stood for Indira. See Paul
Brass, The Politics of India Since Independence, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995) p. 72. The analysis of the Congress in this essay relies
heavily on Brass, pp. 69-78.
18 It is interesting that similar populist politics and economics were employed at the
same time by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan Peoples Party in
Pakistan (1972-77) and by Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her Sri
Lanka Freedom Party in Sri Lanka (1970-1977). All three leaders emphasized
mobilizing social support to themselves rather than institutionalizing social support
to the party or government.
19 Brass, p. 72.

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 Christopher Candland.

to assume control of the state government. The president, in

practice, acts upon the instruction of the prime minister. Nehru
used the president's rule sparingly. Mrs. Gandhi, and her succes
sors, used the president's rule more extensively. Non-Congress
coalitions at the center would later exercise this same preroga
tive, most blatantly after the emergency when the Left Front gov
ernment dismissed nine Congress state governments. While Mrs.
Gandhi's populist rhetoric may have initially helped to consoli
date the electoral support basis of the party, her autarchic con
trol of the Congress quickly undermined the organization.

Congress Decline
The de-institutionalization of the Indian National Con
gress under Mrs. Indira Gandhi is the major theme in the post
colonial history of the Congress. It may be more convincing, how
ever, to relate the decline of the Congress to unprecedented eco
nomic challenges and to Congress's unfulfilled promises of social
and economic reform than to attribute it solely to one woman's
style of leadership. Mrs. Gandhi may have been less benign to
ward lower level politicians in part because regional autonomy
movements and protests were more threatening to the center.20
Further, Nehru and other senior Congress leaders had pro
moted industrial development and avoided effecting radical
changes in the social patterns of agricultural production. Instead,
economic policy in the initial years of independence focused on
the less politically divisive problem of industrial development.
Results of the import substitution-oriented industrialization strat
egy, which has only recently been abandoned, include a highly
diversified industrial sector and a large measure of technological
self-sufficiency. Other results of Nehruvian socialism include de
clining capital productivity and persistent high unemployment.
Mrs. Gandhi's response to these and other economic crises in
cluded the nationalization of numerous labor intensive indus
tries, including coal mines and textile mills.
In this troubled economic environment, the Allahabad
High Court found Mrs. Gandhi guilty of violating minor election

See further Jeffrey, pp. 181-182.

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Journal of International Affairs

regulations.21 She was ordered to resign from office and banned

from holding office for six years. Two days later, in the earlier
hours of 26 June 1975, Mrs. Gandhi declared a state of national
emergency. An executive order, amending the Maintenance of
Internal Security Act, permitted Mrs. Gandhi to have thousands
of opposition politicians and other detractors arrested and jailed,
the press censored and opposition protests and political gather
ings banned. During the emergency, Mrs. Gandhi used the
president's rule in the only two non-Congress controlled states,
Gujarat and Tamilnadu, to bring "the entire country under di
rect dictatorial rule from Delhi."22 She and a small group of sup
porters, including her son, Sanjay Gandhi, directed police and
local government and effected administrative transfers.
With a stronger than two-thirds majority in both houses
of parliament, she amended the constitution to remain in power.
Then, persuaded by her advisors that she would win, the prime
minister scheduled the national elections for March 1977. After
an ignominious 20-month emergency rule, Mrs. Gandhi was
soundly defeated by a hastily assembled coalition of political par
ties and protest movements. Indira Gandhi's emergency irrecon
cilably damaged the Congress's ability to accommodate factional
interests.
Morarji Desai, the conservative finance minister whom
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had dismissed in an opening con
frontation with the Syndicate, became prime minister at the head
of the Janata coalition. The Janata coalition, however, proved to
be unstable, and the electorate returned the Congress to power
at the center in elections in May 1980. The growth of non-Con
gress political parties, which have thrice held power at the center,
has in large part been made possible by defections and expulsions
from the Congress. All of India's non-Congress prime ministers,
Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, VP. Singh, Chandrashekar, H.D.
Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral, were formerly members of
the Congress party. VP. Singh, former defense minister and fi
nance minister to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, for example, and
others expelled from the Congress in 1987, formed the Jan Morcha

21 Mrs. Gandhi was found guilty of having government officials erect speaker stands
and supply electricity to her campaign appearances. Henry Hart, Indira Gandhi's
India: A Political System Reappraised (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976) p. 3.
22 Brass, p. 41.

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 Christopher Candland

(People's Front). The Jan Morcha later joined with the Janata
Party and the Bharatiya Lok Dal to successfully challenge Rajiv
Gandhi's Congress in the ninth general elections in 1989, when
VP. Singh became prime minister.23
Mrs. Gandhi's rule between the 1969 Congress split and
the onset of the state emergency in 1975 is aptly characterized
as plebiscitary.24 Her governance was based on mass appeals un
mediated by the party organization. But Jawaharlal Nehru's rule,
to which Mrs. Gandhi's is either explicitly or implicitly compared,
was unusual for the high degree of political agreement over po
tentially divisive developmental challenges. Nehru managed re
gional demands well. However, the challenges facing the Con
gress and the Congress leadership after Nehru's death were deeper.
These included war with Pakistan over Kashmir in 1965, famine
conditions after successive monsoon failures in 1965 and 1966,
war with Pakistan again in 1971 over the secession of East Paki
stan, the absorption of hundreds of thousands of refugees from
the war, and a number of powerful and militant separatist move
ments, including the Telengana and coastal Andhra separatist
movements. Moreover, divisions within the Congress were height
ened by the economic crises beginning in the mid-1960s.

Party Politics After Congress Dominance

The Congress has gradually lost its once reliable support

from significant constituencies since Mrs. Gandhi's emergency
seriously injured the relationship between Congress and Muslim
voters.25 Muslims, lower caste, and scheduled caste constituents,
who once regularly voted for the Congress, have gradually shifted
their support to the Janata Dal and to various regional parties.26
In many states, parties have successfully mobilized voters on the
basis of caste. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, for example, the Janata
Dal and the Bahujan Samaj Party have mobilized scheduled caste
voters. In Kerala and West Bengal, the Communist Party of In
dia (Marxist) has mobilized lower and scheduled caste voters.

23 Baxter, Malik, Kennedy and Oberst, p. 110.

24 ibid., pp. 136-137.
25 Rudolph and Rudolph, p. 190.
26 See further the findings of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies' na
tional exit poll, coordinated by VB. Singh and Yogendra Yadav, as reported in
Yogendra Yadav, "How India Voted," India Today (31 May 1996) pp. 44-50.

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Journal of International Affairs

India's highly federalized political system allowed regional

parties to secure portions of the Congress vote and to mobilize
new constituencies. State governments have significant author
ity in most economic and social sectors, including agriculture and
industry, education and labor. The evolution of the political party
system in India has been heavily influenced by competition be
tween political parties over public resources at national and state
levels. States not only have unique political histories and diverse
cultures, but also distinct political parties and configurations of
party competition. In many Indian states, predominantly in the
southern and eastern states, variations of a two-party system have
emerged.27
Notable Congress successes in the 1984 and 1991 general
elections are commonly attributed to sympathy waves following
the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, respec
tively. In the aftermath of the 1991 parliamentary election, some
argued that there was no national alternative to the Congress.
However, in the 1989 and 1996 parliamentary elections, with
out the sympathy vote, Congress support in the polls fell to his
torical lows. After the state assembly elections conducted be
tween 1993 and 1995, some then pronounced the final defeat of
the Congress system.28 Nevertheless, in the April/May 1996 par
liamentary elections, when the Congress received just 28.8 per
cent of the vote, its lowest percentage of the popular vote in a
general election, its vote still exceeded that of any other party.
The BJP won the largest number of seats with just 20.3 percent
of the popular vote, concentrated in the Hindi heartland states
of Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
In only five of 25 states and union territories, Assam, Bihar,
Haryana, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, did the Congress re
ceive less than 30 percent of the vote; the BJP received more than
30 percent of the vote in only five states.
Another portrait of the Indian electorate can be drawn
from constituency level data in state assembly elections. Between
the 1952 and 1993-95 state assembly elections, electoral partici
pation increased steadily, from 45 percent to 64 percent of the
electorate.29 Available evidence suggests that the higher partici

27 Brass, p. 103.
28 Yogendra Yadav, "Reconfiguration in Indian Politics: State Assembly Elections, 1993
95," Economic and Political Weekly, 31:2-3, (13-20 January 1996).
2" ibid., p. 96.

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 Christopher Candland

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Journal of International Affairs

pation rate is a reflection of increased participation of other back

ward castes, a designation including those backward castes not
listed, or scheduled, in two 1950 Presidential ordinances. Time
series data on electoral participation by social background is not
available. However, "[pjractically everywhere rural constituen
cies report a higher turnout."30 The candidates that voters send
to Parliament and to state assemblies are also increasingly of ru
ral and of lower caste background. The percentage of Lok Sabha
members with agriculturist backgrounds has risen steadily from
22.5 percent in 1952 to 51.4 percent in 1996.31
In India, as in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the
generation of leaders who held power after independence have
been replaced by a generation of leaders whose constituents and
issues are more representative of society as a whole. The national
parties that led in important phases of the independence struggle,
including the Communist Party of India and the Congress, have
been in long-term decline. Throughout South Asia, the national
political parties that led independence movements tended to
dominate government in the formative years of independence only
to give way to increasingly agrarian, confessional, regional and
vernacular political parties.32 It is not only that the Congress but
also the institutions of government, with which the Congress has
been identified, that are suffering a crisis of legitimacy. As mecha
nisms for democratic participation, political parties in India, as
elsewhere, are limited. Social movements often vie with political
parties as mechanisms for democratic representation, and have
provided impetus to emergent political parties.
As Table 1 suggests, the Congress suffered a significant
decline in support between the 1991 and the 1996 Lok Sabha
elections. However, the party remains the first or second most
significant party in all but one state. Despite its decline, Con
gress remains the most significant national political party.33 No
party has out-performed the Congress in percentage of the vote
secured in a general election. Only twice since independence has
a non-Congress party received even half of the Congress's per

30 ibid.
■" Harinder Baweja, "Changing Face of Parliament," India Today (15 July 1996) p.
42.
32 For more on national parties in the Indian party system, see Brass, pp. 100-104.
Brass, p. 102.

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 Christopher Candland

centage of the vote. Even in the April/May 1996 general elec

tion, the third occasion on which the Congress failed to secure
the seats necessary to form a government at the center, no party
gained a higher portion of the popular vote than did the Con
gress. At the same time, non-Congress political parties, including
the BJP and some regional parties, are now well-established in
India's party system.
The gradual decline in electoral support to the Congress
from significant social sectors is not surprising for a national in
dependence party in one of the world's most diverse countries.
As the organizational umbrella for a national independence move
ment, the Congress devoted attention to the recruitment and par
ticipation of party members and party workers. Through party
splits and electoral defeats, the Congress has changed substan
tially since its founding more than a century ago. In the first two
decades of independence, Congress developed the depth of lead
ership capable of accommodating and disciplining rivals. Under
Indira Gandhi, the Congress party in government helped to un
dermine the Congress organization.

Pluralism

Does the increasingly representative character of Indian

parliaments and state assemblies signal greater pluralism in In
dia? India has witnessed a transition from single party domi
nance to increasingly diverse regional configurations of party com
petition. At the time of independence, the leadership of the In
dian National Congress was educated in Western schools, spoke
English fluently, and enjoyed considerable social status and eco
nomic resources, as did the leadership of the independence move
ments in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Land-owning upper classes con
tinue to dominate politics in South Asia, but voters have increas
ingly placed in office individuals with more agrarian and vernacu
lar roots. Leadership in all parties, including the Congress, is in
creasingly that of lower and middle status backward castes.34 Is
this not then evidence of pluralism?
Assessing whether the Indian political party system is more
or less pluralist with the gradual decline of the Congress demands
clarity on the theoretical postulates of pluralism and the intellec

ibid., pp. 103-104.

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Journal of International Affairs

tual tradition within which pluralism is embedded. Pluralism

presumes that individuals are the principal social actors, that in
dividual interests animate behavior, and that, as these interests
are neither fixed nor permanent, they can be aggregated and ne
gotiated by political parties and other organizations in society in
a market fashion.
The intellectual founders of the American Revolution
found political parties, well-organized factions bent upon gaining
political power, to be inherently dangerous.35 The early Amer
can resolution to the dominating and violent tendencies of fac
tions was a governmental structure that would multiply factions
through an institutionalized separation of judicial, legislative and
executive powers. The resolution prefigured the answer that pl
ralism would provide to American democratic theorists in th
middle of the 20th century.36 The pluralist solution presumes that
individual interests are un-fixed and fluid. It is the assumption
that interests can be negotiated makes diversity of public asso
ciations, interest groups, social organizations and political par
ties, the mechanism for guarding against tyranny of both elit
and popular varieties. With sufficient diversity of opinion among
cross-cutting and un-fixed interests, it is reasoned, an equilibrium
will arise that mitigates against the domination of the many b
the few.37
Political parties thrive in India as throughout South Asia.
But the nature of diversity of political parties is as important as
the fact of diversity. Parties that led historically significant inde
pendence movements in South Asia, often led by first families
have given way to more populist leaders and confessional poli
tics, to the greater significance of regional issues and personali
ties, and proportionately more voters from agricultural and rural
backgrounds. The political parties that have made their way on
to the political scene in South Asian countries in recent years are
not of the same kind as the national political parties that pre

The Federalists disagreed, however, about whether the Republican party was a fac
tion. See Terence Ball, "The Prehistory of the Party," in Transforming Political
Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History (New York: Basil Blackwell,
1988) pp. 42-46.
See Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1971).
See further C. B. Macpherson, "Market Concepts in Political Theory," in Democratic
Theory: Essays in Retrieval (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) pp. 185-194.

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 Christopher Candland

ceded them. They represent new constituents and new aspira

tions, but not every interest is qualitatively similar. Religious
revivalist and caste-oriented politics often poses exclusivist poli
cies, which make the pluralisms solution—negotiation of inter
ests—seem Utopian. The rise of regional and confessional politi
cal parties in South Asia does not necessarily provide a new sprin
kling of forces for a new pluralist equilibrium. The agreement by
the largely upper-caste backed BJP and the scheduled caste
Bahujan Samaj Party to alternate at governing Uttar Pradesh for
periods of six months each suggests that caste representation does
not produce the equilibrium of interests envisioned in the origi
nal concept of pluralism.
Political party competition in India and elsewhere in South
Asia is increasingly along communal and caste lines. Next to po
litical party alliances, caste loyalty is currently the most signifi
cant determinant of electoral outcomes. In some states, as in
Tamilnadu, backward castes have constituted the main opposi
tion to the Congress.38 In other states, there is clear evidence of
caste polarization of parties and their platforms.39 The issue de
serves a more thorough discussion than is possible here, and it is
difficult to generalize about Indian political parties without state
and district level analysis. However, pluralism, as envisioned by
its major proponents, is no more in evidence today in India than
it was under the initial period of the Congress system, when com
promises between conflicting interests were reached within a pre
dominantly western-educated, land-owning nationalist party.
Electoral alliances between caste oriented parties are inconsis
tent with the market model of interest representation inherent in
the concept of pluralism.
One might also distinguish between internal and external
pluralism in party systems. While competitive political parties
may be essential to pluralist political systems, they are not gener
ally internally democratic. The Congress is not an exception.
Elections held for membership in the Congress Working Commit
tee (CWC), the executive body of the Congress, were held in 1992
for the first time in 20 years. The Congress Parliamentary Board,

38 Brass, pp. 103-109.

38 Kanchan Chandra and Chandrika Parmar, "Party Strategies in the Uttar Pradesh
Assembly Elections, 1996," Economic and Political Weekly, 32:5 (1 February 1997)
pp. 214-222.

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Journal of International Affairs

which determines final lists of party candidates, has not met for
five.40 Only one-third of the CWC was elected by party mem
bers; the other CWC members are appointed by the President of
the Congress organization. Arid when elections were held under
P. V. Narasimha Rao, elected members were asked to resign their
seats so that they could be appointed by Rao. The Congress party
no longer entertains an open exchange of potentially rival ideas.
In the post-P.V Narasimha Rao era, there initially ap
peared to be grounds for believing that the Congress would inter
nally democratize. Under P.V. Narasimha Rao, the Congress had
suffered further defections and splits. In September 1996, after
Congress's defeat in the 1996 general election, Sitaram Kesri re
placed P.Y Narasimha Rao as Congress president. Kesri appointed
new Congress office bearers and brought back Congress dissidents.
Appointments, such as those to the Congress Parliamentary Board,
were given to state level Congress leaders, helping to solidify Con
gress unity. Kesri's announcement of withdrawal of Congress sup
port to the ruling United Front, however, took some of the party
leaders by surprise, indicating that the Congress organization still
suffers from personal factionalism.
There has been considerable concern that the rise of Hindu
revivalism will transform India's party system. While political
parties are increasingly representative of the rural and vernacu
lar interests of the Indian electorate and while electoral campaigns
and political discourse is imbued with more cultural and religious
images and content, the concern with religious revivalism may be
overstated. India's competitive party system limits religious re
vivalist movements. Champions at the polls must demonstrate
skills in governance, which tends to modify militancy and exposes
claims of extraordinary virtue to everyday politics and adminis
tration.
While India's political parties increasingly appeal to caste
loyalties and communal divisions, Indian voters tend to behave
as if their interests are un-fixed. The Indian voter has a strong
preference against incumbents. Anecdotal evidence might point
to the Indian voter's unassailable reasoning that the most likely
to abuse power are those already in positions of power. What

Zafar Agha and Harinder Baweja, "Sitaram Kesri, Bracing for Power," India Today
(31 December 1996) pp. 33-37.

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 Christopher Candland

ever the precise reasons for shifting electoral identities and pref
erences, it is not that Indian voters are volatile, but rather that
they apparently define their electoral interests in un-fixed ways,
voting by caste in one election and by conviction in the next. It is
this facet of pluralism, the evolving recalculation by voters of their
interests, that is most abundant in Indian politics and in South
Asia politics in general, ds

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