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Government and Opposition in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

James Manor
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Abstract

Interactions between ruling and opposition parties in India have long been sorely neglected by political analysts. This study finds clear contrasts between interactions at national and state levels in this federal system, and further, often marked variations across the 28 states – each of which has its own Westminster-style legislature. Government–opposition relations range from semi-civilized to caustic, although most cases are situated some at distance from those extremes. So, despite a recent confrontation in the Indian Parliament, there are no strong trends towards either deterioration or greater accommodation. This is a study in ambiguity.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , 2011 , pp. 436 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011.

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References

1 W. H. Morris-Jones, Parliament in India, London, Longmans, 1957; M. Weiner, Party Building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957; R. Kothari, ‘The Congress System in India’, Asian Survey, 4: 12 (December, 1964), pp. 1161–73. See also W. H. Morris-Jones, ‘Parliament and the Dominant Party: The Indian Experience’, and ‘Dominance and Dissent: Their Interrelations in the Indian Party System’, in W. H. Morris-Jones, Politics Mainly Indian, Madras, Orient Longmans, 1978, pp. 196–232.

2 Wyatt, A., Party System and Change in South India: Political Entrepreneurs, Patterns and Problems, London and New Delhi, Routledge, 2009 Google Scholar; Raghavan, E. and Manor, J., Broadening and Deepening Democracy: Political Innovation in Karnataka, London and New Delhi, Routledge, 2009 Google Scholar. See also several of the studies in Shastri, S., Suri, K. C. and Yadav, Y. (eds), Electoral Politics in Indian States: Lok Sabha Elections in 2004 and Beyond, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2009, esp. ch. 22Google Scholar.

3 The first is Z. Hasan (ed.), Parties and Party Politics in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2002. The second is P. R. de Souza and E. Sridharan (eds), India's Political Parties, New Delhi, London and Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2006. This comment entails some self-criticism since one of my own papers was reprinted in the first of these books.

4 I am grateful to Zoya Hasan, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, E. Sridharan and Yogendra Yadav for advice on how to develop this article. They are not to blame for what appears here.

5 Even this statement oversimplifies, since it omits several smaller ‘Union Territories’. But 29 arenas are quite enough for this discussion.

6 For much more detail on the complexities that lie behind these comments, see P. R. Brass, The New Cambridge History of India: The Politics of India since Independence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, vol. IV.1, pp. 64–82; J. Manor, ‘Parties and the Party System’, in A. Kohli (ed.), India's Democracy: Changing State-Society Relations, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 62–98, and in P. Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 92–124; Y. Yadav, ‘Electoral Politics in the Time of Change: India's Third Electoral System’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34: 34–5 (21 August–3 September 1999), pp. 2393–9; E. Sridharan, ‘The Fragmentation of the Indian Party System, 1952–1999’, in Hasan, Parties and Party Politics, pp. 489–98.

7 The term ‘regional parties’ here refers both to explicitly regional (one-state) parties and de facto regional parties that claim to be national but have significant strength in only a tiny number of states. The latter include the two communist parties, various Janata parties, and the Nationalist Congress Party.

8 The alliance that governed between 1999 and 2004 contained, at various times, 23 or 24 parties. The ruling coalition since 2004 has contained between 10 and 13 parties.

9 They are discussed in detail in J. Manor, ‘Regional Parties in Federal Systems’, in D. V. Verney and B. Arora (eds), Multiple Identities in a Single State: Indian Federalism in a Comparative Perspective, Delhi, Konark, 1995, pp. 107–35.

10 For more details on coalitions at the national level, see Arora, B., ‘Negotiating Differences: Federal Coalitions and National Cohesion’, in Frankel, F., Hasan, Z., Bhargava, R. and Arora, B. (eds), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 176–206 Google Scholar; Arora, B., ‘The Political Parties and the Party System: The Emergence of New Coalitions’, in Hasan, Parties and Party Politics, pp. 504–32Google Scholar; Sridharan, E., ‘Principles, Power and Coalition Politics in India: Lessons from Theory, Comparison and Recent History’, in Khanna, D. D. and Kueck, G. W. (eds), Principles, Power and Politics, New Delhi, Macmillan, 1999, pp. 270–90Google Scholar.

11 These are approximate numbers because certain state election outcomes were, for complicated reasons, ambiguous.

12 For more detail, see J. Manor, ‘Did the Central Government's Poverty Initiatives Help to Re-elect It?’, in L. Saez and G. Singh (eds), New Dimensions of Politics in India: The UPA in Power, London and New Delhi, Routledge, forthcoming.

13 The states are Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab (which some may see as ‘bi-polar plus’) and Kerala (where the party system is highly fragmented, but two long-standing alliances make it bi-polar).

14 The states are Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

15 The states are Karnataka, Orissa, Assam (bordering in some recent periods on ‘three-party plus’) and Uttar Pradesh (which at the last national, but not at recent state elections, has been a four-party system).

16 The states are Maharashtra (a four-party system, fragmenting, but still yielding bi-polar coalitions), Haryana (fragmented, but with bi-polar tendencies), Bihar (fragmented, but tending some of the time towards bi-polar coalitions), Andhra Pradesh (badly fragmented and fragmenting further, but still governable), and Jharkhand (badly fragmented, and thus at times close to being ungovernable).

17 E. Sridharan has identified seven explanations for the fragmentation of Indian party systems, all of which have some substance – and they are not mutually exclusive. They are as follows. a.-the growing politicization of social cleavages along regional lines since the late 1960s, in reaction to the centralization of power, especially by Congress governments before 1989; b.-the de-linking of state and national elections (so that they usually do not happen simultaneously) that occurred when an early national election was called in 1971; c.-the quickening political consciousness among newly prosperous and mobilized groups from intermediate levels in social hierarchies, in the wake of the Green Revolution of the 1970s; d.-reactions of regional political elites and of intermediate-level social groups (mainly in North India) against the lack of responsiveness in political and policy matters that over-centralization by Congress leaders bred in the years up to 1989 (this links explanations a and c); e.-the impact of incentives that emerge from the constitutional division of powers between national and state governments – which gives the states control of agriculture, irrigation, electricity policy, education, health, etc.; f.-the (for a time) acute politicization of caste and religious divisions after 1990 that created major problems for a party such as the Congress Party that tried to appeal to a broad range of social groups, and gave rise to regional parties that stressed caste opportunities; and g.-‘the systemic properties of the first-past-the-post electoral system working themselves out in a federal polity’– properties that (following Duverger) lend themselves to the emergence of two-party or bi-polar systems in many states, but these are bi-polar systems in which the two main parties are different from state to state, so that if we look across the whole of India, the result is fragmentation within the nationwide party system. For more detail, see Sridharan, ‘The Fragmentation of the Party System’, pp. 493–6. The quotation is from p. 495.

18 Note one important contextual matter: a reliable poll at the 2009 parliamentary election found that both the national government and state governments (which were often controlled by rival parties) had positive approval ratings in every major state except Jharkhand, where normlessness flourishes, partly because no party has much strength. The poll was conducted by the National Election Study, overseen by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The full table is provided in Manor, ‘Did the Central Government's Poverty Initiatives Help’. These ratings represent a startling change from the anti-incumbency sentiments that had prevailed over most of the preceding 25 years.

19 If only the last two years were considered, we might also have noted an upward trend in Rajasthan. At a state election in December 2008, an extravagantly arrogant, autocratic BJP chief minister – who had poisoned relations with both the opposition and every important section of her own party – was removed from the scene, but if we consider that state over a slightly longer time span, the trend is ‘flat’.

20 See Pratap Bhanu Mehta's essay in the Indian Express, 29 December 2010.

21 For example, in the run-up to the Karnataka state election in May 2008, the BJP used immense sums from illicit mining interests to purchase the loyalty of key Congress Party leaders in most of the districts of that state. That action did not prove decisive in that election, but it gave the BJP a major advantage. For details, see J. Manor, ‘Letting a Winnable Election Slip Away: Congress in Karnataka’, Economic and Political Weekly, 43: 41 (11 October 2008), pp. 23–8.

22 However, at this writing in January 2011, it appears to be heading for defeat in a few months' time.

23 The main factors are the surge in revenues that state and central governments have enjoyed since 2003, and the tendency of ruling politicians to spend much of that money on ‘post-clientelist’ development programmes that are, for the most part quite popular. Both of those trends are discussed elsewhere in this article.

24 Indian Express, 19 December 2010 and Frontline, 17 December 2010.

25 For more details, see J. Manor, ‘Political Leadership: India's Chief Ministers and the Problem of Governability’, in P. Oldenburg (ed.), India Briefing 1995: Staying the Course, New York, Asia Society, 1996, pp. 47–74.

26 The Hindu, 23 December 2010.

27 Economic Times, 30 December 2010.

28 Indian Express, 28 November 2010. See also the opposition leader's claim that the state had ‘a government of guns and goons and greed, having looted the State treasury to finance its goons …’ in The Hindu, 6 December 2010.

29 This writer witnessed such violence in 1977. For an explanation of its origins, which offers sharp contrasts with India, see J. Manor, ‘The Failure of Political Integration in Sri Lanka’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 17: 1 (November 1978), pp. 21–46.

30 For details, see Wade, R., ‘The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is Not Better at Development’, World Development, 4 (1985), pp. 467–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 I am grateful to Yogendra Yadav for this point.

32 This is examined in great detail in Raghavan and Manor, Broadening and Deepening.

33 Gujarat stands alongside Uttar Pradesh, although it differs markedly from that state. Its chief minister has, since a ghastly spate of communal riots in 2002, succeeded by brutish means in polarizing society between Hindus and Muslims. His brand of bigotry has occasionally been attempted in other states, but it has had limited popular appeal and even less staying power.

34 The only exceptions are the two left parties, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The DMK in Tamil Nadu was once an exception, but its organization has decayed markedly as the party has degenerated into the plaything of one family. The BJP is often said to be an exception, but outside urban centres this is a misperception; see J. Manor, ‘In Part a Myth: The BJP's Organisational Strength’, in K. Adeney and L. Saez (eds), Coalition Politics and Hindu Nationalism, London and New Delhi, Routledge, 2005, pp. 55–74.

35 For more detail, see J. Manor, ‘ “Ethnicity” and Politics in India’, International Affairs, 75: 3 (July 1996), pp. 459–75.

36 This is especially true of state-level units of the Congress Party, some of which are chameleon-like. For example, in the state of Kerala, Congress leads an alliance of parties in a bi-polar rivalry against a rather similar alliance led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The latter has long pursued a centre-left agenda and has been the most generous state government in India to elected councils at lower levels. In response, the Congress there has adopted similar postures on both issues. But in Andhra Pradesh, the main adversary of Congress has been a regional party with no consistent ideology that has radically centralized power in the hands of its leader – so that it was the most hostile party to elected councils at lower levels in India. When Congress displaced it at an election in 2004, its state-level leader also radically centralized power and treated those elected councils with such hostility that he violated laws passed by a Congress-led government in New Delhi. (He got away with this because Congress President Sonia Gandhi needed a strong leader in this important state.)

37 When one party or alliance of parties looms quite large, an important consideration is the ‘index of opposition unity’– a concept that David Butler, Ashok Lahiri and Prannoy Roy usefully introduced in earlier election analyses. It is still used, especially at the state level where single parties sometimes come close to dominating the scene. Since the emergence of a ‘bi-polar plus’ system at the national level in the late 1990s, analysts – including Roy – have found the concept somewhat less useful.

38 For much more detail, see J. Manor, ‘Prologue’, in R. Kothari (ed.), Caste in Indian Politics, new edition, New Delhi, Orient BlackSwan, 2010, pp. xi–lvi.

39 These are discussed more fully in J. Manor, ‘What Do They Know of India Who Only India Know? The Uses of Comparative Politics’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 48: 4 (November 2010), pp. 505–16.

40 For more on ideological convergence, see Yadav, Y. and Palshikar, S., ‘From Hegemony to Convergence: Party System and Electoral Competition in the Indian States, 1952–2002’, Journal of the Indian School of Political Economy, 1–2 (2003), pp. 5–44 Google Scholar.

41 See J. Manor, ‘Political Regeneration in India’, in D. L. Sheth and A. Nandy (eds), The Multiverse of Democracy: Essays in Honour of Rajni Kothari, New Delhi, London and Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 1994, pp. 230–41.

42 For details, see A. Mozoomdar, ‘The Supreme Court and President's Rule’, in Arora and Verney, Multiple Identities, pp. 160–8.

43 A third landslide occurred in 1984, shortly after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, but it was inspired not by an issue of regime, but by a wave of sympathy for her son and successor as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

44 Except in the state of Gujarat, the BJP has felt compelled to shelve nearly its entire Hindu nationalist agenda, partly because all but one of its 24 coalition partners when it governed at the national level were uneasy with it, and partly because it has performed better at the state level when that agenda is de-emphasized (as its victory as junior partner in an alliance with a regional party in Bihar demonstrated in late 2010).

45 Note, however, that the penalties for defection become less severe as a legislature nears the end of its term. When that occurs, defections become more feasible and common.

46 I am grateful to Pratap Bhanu Mehta for stressing these points.

47 The role of the federal system in quarantining state-level conflicts was identified long ago in Weiner, Party Building.

48 See T. R. Andhyarujina, ‘Disgracing Parliament: A Dangerous Precedent’, The Hindu, 7 January 2011.

49 In Karnataka, the two main opposition parties mounted protests against BJP corruption on the floor of the state legislature to prevent it from functioning, until the chief minister resigned. The uproar eventually forced the session of the legislative assembly to be abandoned after just two days. The Hindu, 10–11 and 14 January 2011.