Congress Decline and Party Pluralism in India.

• Author: Candland, Christopher

The Indian National Congress party was founded in 1885 to petition the British government in India for administrative and political reform. Under British rule, the Congress gained experience in contesting elections and in governing at provincial and municipal levels. In the 1920s, Mohandas Gandhi reorganized the party, which helped it to evolve into one of the world's 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 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 popularly elected house of Parliament.(4) The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) occupies the largest block of seats. Twenty-eight parties are represented in Parliament, the largest number in independent India's history. A coalition of 13 regional and left parties, the United Front, presently governs at the center.(5)

The Indian National Congress has been the most important institution in India's modern political development. The Congress, a favorite example of a dominant party in a competitive party system, was thought to be the backbone of the developing world's best institutionalized democracy.(6) Today, the Congress 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 social forces and popular demands that have lead to religious revivalist and to caste-oriented parties cannot be accommodated in a parliamentary democracy.

The leadership, constituencies, issues and electoral strategies 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 Indian 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 governance 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 electorate 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 undemocratic electoral system but rather by virtue of its depth of leadership 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 Revolutionary Party) and Indonesia's GOLKAR. Strongly competitive multi-party elections have been regularly held in India since independence at national, state and local levels and electoral verdicts have been respected by unsuccessful incumbents.

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 obtaining the greatest plurality of votes, not necessarily the majority of votes. An edge at the polls therefore can result in a large majority of seats, especially if political parties divide constituencies 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 consistently 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 disproportionate 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 organizational capacity, relying on local, state and national level Congress 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 leadership. 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 individuals with different political ideologies and constituencies. Until 1948 the Congress even permitted parties that had distinct organizational structures and independent constitutional principles to operate within the Congress organization.(12)

In its first two decades as a party in government, the Congress 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 Congress 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 characterize 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 facilitated 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 government, Nehru respected the independence of the Congress organization 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 government. Lal 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...