This chapter examines political parties directly. Earlier chapters only glanced at them — as vehicles of federal power-sharing, and as negotiators of social division.
This chapter asks two questions in turn: why do we need political parties at all, and how many parties are good for a democracy? Those answers then introduce India's national and regional parties, before this chapter asks what is wrong with parties today, and what can be done about it.
A political party is a group of people who come together to contest elections and hold power in government. They agree on policies meant to promote the collective good.
Since people disagree on what is good for all, parties try to persuade voters their own policies are better than the rest. A party is known by which part of society it stands for, which policies it supports, and whose interests it upholds. Every party has three parts: its leaders, its active members, and its followers.
KEY-TERM: a partisan is a person strongly committed to a party, group, or faction. Partisanship means taking a side, and struggling to see an issue in balance.
A party's own definition already builds this in — it is partisan by nature, because it stands for a part of society, not the whole of it.
Test a cynical claim before you accept it. A cartoon voice puts it this way: "Parties are partial, partisan, and lead to partitions. Parties do nothing but divide people. That is their real function!"
Hold that claim against the definition you just read. A party is known by which existing part of society it stands for — it reflects a division already present, it does not manufacture one from nothing. Channelling that partisanship into a contest for power is exactly what lets a large, diverse society form a government at all.
Political parties fill political offices and hold power by doing seven things. They contest elections, selecting candidates by different methods — voters choose in the USA, top leaders choose in India.
They put forward policies, compressing a vast range of opinion into a few positions government can act on. They play a decisive role in making laws, since most legislators vote the way their party leadership decides. They form and run governments, training the leaders who become ministers.
When they lose, they play the opposition — voicing dissent and mobilising criticism of government failures. They shape public opinion, raising issues and sometimes launching movements. And they give ordinary people a route into government machinery and welfare schemes — it is easier to approach a local party leader than a government officer.
KEY-TERM: the ruling party is whichever party — or coalition of parties — actually runs the government. A government's policies follow the line of whichever party holds this position.
Imagine a democracy with no political parties at all, and their necessity becomes visible. Every candidate would run independently. No one could promise major policy change.
A government might still form — but no one would be responsible for how the country as a whole is actually run, since every elected representative would answer only for their own locality.
Many Indian states hold panchayat elections with no political parties allowed to contest formally — and this supplies indirect evidence for the same point.
Even where the party label is barred, villages regularly split into more than one faction. Each faction fields its own "panel" of candidates — exactly what a party does in substance, label or no label.
The rise of political parties is tied directly to the rise of representative democracy. As societies grew large and complex, they needed an agency to gather different views, bring representatives together, and support, restrain, or oppose government policy.
Parties fulfil this need — found in almost every country, big or small, old or new. That is why parties are called a necessary condition for democracy.
Any group of citizens is formally free to form a political party. More than 750 parties are registered with the Election Commission of India — but only a handful are serious contenders in any given election.
So the real question is not how many parties can exist. It is how many major, effective parties are good for a democracy.
Democracies sort into three party systems. A one-party system lets only one party control government, as in China — not a democratic option, since a democracy must let at least two parties compete for power.
A two-party system usually swaps power between two main parties, though smaller parties may contest and win a few seats — the USA, the UK. A multiparty system lets several parties compete, each with a real chance alone or in alliance — India — and government then forms as a coalition.
When several parties in a multiparty system join hands to contest and win together, the grouping is called an alliance or a front. Three major alliances contested India's 2004 parliamentary elections: the National Democratic Alliance, the United Progressive Alliance, and the Left Front.
A country cannot simply choose its party system. It evolves over a long time, shaped by society, its social and regional divisions, its political history, and its electoral system — none of which change quickly.
India's own multiparty system fits this pattern: the country's social and geographical diversity is too large for only two or three parties to absorb.
Test the three-way classification against India's own states. The source names three patterns found at State level — a two-party system, a multiparty system with two dominant alliances, and a plain multiparty system.
Find at least two states matching each pattern yourself — the source does not print the answers, and leaves them for you and your class to work out.
Test a common claim before you accept it: that parties face a crisis because they are very unpopular, and citizens are indifferent to them.
Large-sample survey evidence — the State of Democracy in South Asia, 2007 — shows this belief is only partly true. Trust in parties really is low, among the least-trusted institutions worldwide. But the "indifference" half does not hold — participation in party activity is fairly high in India, and has been rising steadily for three decades.
DATUM (State of Democracy in South Asia, 2007): the share of people reporting themselves members of a political party was higher in India than in several advanced democracies. That list includes Canada, Japan, Spain, and South Korea.
Over the last three decades, both figures have risen steadily — the share reporting party membership, and the share who say they feel "close to a political party."
Federal democracies tend to carry two kinds of party: parties present in only one federal unit, and parties present across several or all of them. India follows this pattern.
Country-wide parties are called "national parties" — they run units in various states, but those units mostly follow one national policy and strategy.
Every party must register with the Election Commission, which treats all parties equally. It gives special facilities — including a unique election symbol reserved for a party's own candidates — only to "recognised" parties that meet its criteria.
The Election Commission sets a different bar at each level. A party earns State-party status by winning at least 6 per cent of the total votes in a State Assembly election, and at least two seats there.
A party earns national-party status by winning at least 6 per cent of the vote in Lok Sabha elections, or 6 per cent across Assembly elections in four States. It must also win at least four Lok Sabha seats.
DATUM: per the Election Commission's notification issued in 2023, six parties are currently recognised as national parties. The six profiles that follow cover each one in turn.
PROFILE: the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) formed on 26 November 2012, following the 2011 anti-corruption movement, founded on accountability, clean administration, transparency, and good governance.
Within a year it became the second-largest party in the Delhi Assembly, and formed a government with Congress support. It currently forms the government in Punjab and Delhi; in the 2019 Lok Sabha election it won one seat.
PROFILE: the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) formed in 1984 under Kanshi Ram's leadership, seeking to represent and secure power for the bahujan samaj — Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs, and religious minorities.
Its main base is Uttar Pradesh, where it has formed the state government several times, with support from different parties at different times. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election it polled about 3.63 per cent of votes and won 10 seats.
PROFILE: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was founded in 1980, reviving the earlier Bharatiya Jana Sangh (formed by Syama Prasad Mukherjee in 1951). It draws on India's traditional culture and values, and on Deendayal Upadhyaya's ideas of integral humanism.
Its support base, once concentrated in the north and west and in cities, expanded widely in the 1990s. It first came to power in 1998 leading the National Democratic Alliance, and won 303 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, its largest tally — it currently leads the ruling NDA government at the Centre.
PROFILE: the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI-M, was founded in 1964. It follows Marxism-Leninism, supports socialism, secularism, and democracy, and accepts elections as a useful route to socio-economic justice.
It has strong support in West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura, especially among the poor, factory workers, and farmers — it governed West Bengal without a break for 34 years. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election it won about 1.75 per cent of votes and 3 seats.
PROFILE: the Indian National Congress (INC), popularly the Congress Party, is one of the oldest parties in the world, founded in 1885. Under Jawaharlal Nehru it sought to build a modern, secular, democratic republic, and dominated Indian politics for decades after Independence.
It ruled at the Centre until 1977, and again from 1980 to 1989; its support declined after 1989, but it remains present across the country. It led the United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 to 2019, winning 19.5 per cent of votes and 52 seats in 2019.
PROFILE: the National People's Party (NPP) formed in July 2013 under P.A. Sangma's leadership — the first party from North East India to reach national-party status. It centres on education, employment for all, and empowering every section of society.
It has formed the government in Meghalaya, and holds a presence across many North Eastern states; in the 2019 Lok Sabha election it won one seat.
Parties beyond the six recognised national parties are mostly classified as "State parties" — commonly called regional parties, though the label does not require regional ideology. Some, like the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal, are all-India organisations that happen to have succeeded only in some states.
Others, like the Biju Janata Dal, the Sikkim Democratic Front, the Mizo National Front, and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, are built consciously around one State's own identity.
Over the last three decades, State parties have grown in both number and strength. No national party could win a Lok Sabha majority alone until 2014, forcing national parties to ally with State parties. Since 1996, nearly every State party has had a turn inside a national coalition government, strengthening federalism and democracy in the process.
Dissatisfaction with political parties is real, in India and worldwide. It converges on four problem areas parties must face if they are to stay effective instruments of democracy.
The first challenge: a worldwide tendency for parties to concentrate power in one or a few leaders at the top. Parties typically keep no membership register, hold no regular organisational meetings, and rarely run internal elections.
Ordinary members get little information on internal decisions, and have almost no way to influence them. So leaders gain ever more power to decide in the party's own name, and personal loyalty starts to matter more than loyalty to policy.
The second challenge, dynastic succession, is related to the first. Because most parties lack open, transparent procedures, an ordinary worker has few ways to rise to the top.
Those already leading a party are positioned to favour people close to them — including their own family — and in many parties the top posts stay inside one family permanently. This is unfair to other members, and bad for democracy, since people can gain power without adequate experience or popular support.
The third challenge is the growing role of money and muscle power, especially at election time. Because parties focus on winning, they take short-cuts — nominating candidates who can raise large sums of money.
Rich individuals and companies who fund a party gain influence over its policy and decisions — and in some cases parties support candidates with criminal records, simply because they can win.
The fourth challenge: parties often fail to offer voters a meaningful choice, because a real choice needs parties significantly different from one another.
Ideological difference between parties has shrunk across most of the world — in Britain, the gap between Labour and Conservative has become very small.
In India too, differences among the major parties on economic policy have narrowed. Voters who want a genuinely different option are left with little real choice — sometimes worsened further by leaders shifting from one party to another.
KEY-TERM: defection — changing allegiance from the party a person got elected on, to a different party.
REFORM: after many elected representatives defected to become ministers, or for cash rewards, the Constitution was amended to stop it. Under the law now in force, any MLA or MP who changes parties loses their seat in the legislature.
This has brought defection down. But it has also made dissent inside a party harder — an MP or MLA must now accept whatever the leadership decides, or risk losing the seat.
KEY-TERM: an affidavit is a signed document, submitted to an officer, in which a person makes a sworn statement about their own personal information.
REFORM: to reduce the influence of money and criminals in politics, the Supreme Court ordered every election candidate to file an affidavit — disclosing their property, and any pending criminal cases.
This has put a great deal of information in front of the public. But there is no system to verify whether what a candidate discloses is even true. The source states plainly that whether this has actually reduced the influence of money and crime remains unknown.
REFORM: the Election Commission ordered parties to hold their own internal elections and file income tax returns. Parties have complied — but sometimes only as a formality.
The source states it is not clear whether this step has actually produced more internal democracy inside parties.
Beyond the reforms already in force, three further suggestions come up often. A law could regulate parties' internal affairs — a compulsory membership register, adherence to a party's own constitution, disputes settled by an independent authority, open elections to top posts.
Parties could be required to give at least one-third of their tickets to women candidates, with a matching quota inside decision-making bodies. And elections could receive state funding — support for campaign costs, given in kind or in cash, scaled to votes won in the previous election.
None of these suggestions has been accepted by political parties yet. Even where accepted, legal solutions to political problems call for caution.
Over-regulating parties can backfire — it can push every party to find ways around the law. And parties, in any case, will not pass a law they do not like.
Two non-legal routes to reform remain. Ordinary citizens, pressure groups, movements, and the media can pressure parties through petitions, publicity, and agitation — a party that expects to lose public support for ignoring reform starts to take it seriously.
Parties also improve when people who want change join them directly. The quality of democracy depends on how much the public actually takes part — reform stays difficult if citizens only criticise politics from outside.
This chapter closes on that same claim: the problem of bad politics can only be solved by more, and better, politics.