India’s Democracy at 70: The Shifting Party Balance

Issue Date July 2017
Volume 28
Issue 3
Page Numbers 76-85
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This article reviews the state of India’s two major national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC or Congress party), seventy years after independence in 1947 and three years after the BJP won a majority in the 2014 national election. The article looks at whether these parties are top-down or decentralized in their functioning and how else they might differ. It concludes that while the BJP is on the ascendant, it has not yet achieved the dominance that Congress once had.

About the Author

Eswaran Sridharan is academic director and chief executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India in New Delhi. He is editor most recently of Coalition Politics in India: Selected Issues at the Centre and in the States (2014).

View all work by Eswaran Sridharan