Fixing India’s fractured polity

Prior to 1989, India’s party system produced single-party majority governments based only on plurality of the vote. Since then, over the course of the past six elections, it has produced hung parliaments and multiparty minority and/or coalition governments. This fragmentation of the Indian party system has been widely noted.

Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint

Since 1996, India has seen some of the world’s largest multiparty coalition governments, comprising seven to 12 parties, not counting pre-electoral and post-electoral allies who opt to provide only external support. The number of national parties (with a significant presence in four or more states) actually declined from eight to six between 1989 and 2004, while the number of state parties leapt from 20 to 36 and the number of registered parties increased from 85 to 173 over the same period. The number of parties represented in the Lok Sabha has increased steadily from 23 in 1989 to 38 in 2004, of which the major increase has been in the number of state parties from eight to 24. While the Left Front has been stagnant at 8-10%, the non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), non-Congress, non-Left space—dominated mostly by single-state regional parties—grew from 34% vote share in 1991 to 43% in 2004.

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What has emerged is a party system characterized by a high degree of fragmentation and vigorous competition between parties, indicated also by a high rate of turnover in office at both the parliamentary and state levels. The multiplicity of parties means that a broader range of regional and social group interests finds representation and a share of power. This raises the question as to whether such large multiparty coalitions are functional from the point of view of political stability, governance and economic growth, particularly in a time of economic downturn in which the need for hard decisions might be unpopular in the short term. Political stability should not be reduced to duration; governments can last by crisis management, but this might be at the cost of governance and effective policymaking. If such governments are only suboptimally functional, then why can’t reforms be made to encourage mergers of small parties into larger, unified parties? A better idea would be to introduce incentives for state parties to merge voluntarily to form national parties spanning several states instead of multiparty coalitions, while preserving representation of the diversity of interests. To understand why this is not happening and why fragmentation has occurred, one needs to relate this phenomenon to intra-party democracy and to party finance.