The Future of the Multi-Party System in India

In one line

Whether India remains a multi-party system depends on whether regional parties keep their hold on States, on how party finance is regulated, and on how the recognition rules operate, and there are strong arguments both ways.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the future of the multi-party system in India is contested; the case for its continuance rests on the country's linguistic, regional and social diversity, on the entrenchment of regional parties in State politics, and on the federal structure which gives them a permanent arena; the case for a return to a dominant party system rests on the advantages of scale in finance, organisation and communication, on the consolidation of votes behind national parties, and on the difficulty small parties face in meeting the thresholds for recognition.

What a multi-party system is, and what India has

A multi-party system exists where more than two parties are capable of winning seats and of participating in government, so that a single party's majority is not the normal expectation.

A dominant party system exists where many parties compete but one wins repeatedly, so that competition is real and alternation is rare.

A two-party system exists where two parties alternate and others are marginal. The standard examples are the United States, where the Democrats and the Republicans alternate and no third party has won the presidency in more than a century, and the United Kingdom, where Labour and the Conservatives have formed every government since the nineteen twenties. MU has asked for two such countries by name, so learn a pair.

India has been all three at different times, and describing which is which is the first task of an answer.

The first two decades: a dominant party system at the Union with genuine competition inside the dominant party and multi-party competition in several States.

From the late 1960s to the 1980s: increasing competition, the first alternations, and the growth of State parties.

From the late 1980s to the mid 2010s: a genuine multi-party system in which no party won a majority at the Union.

Since then: single-party majorities at the Union with the multi-party structure intact beneath them, since States continue to be governed by parties that do not compete nationally.

That last observation is the key to the whole question. India's party system is not one system but two: a system at the Union and a system in each State, and they need not be the same shape at the same time.

The case for the multi-party system continuing

1. Diversity has not diminished. The languages, regions, religions and castes that produced regional and community parties are still there, and no party that must appeal across all of them can be everybody's first preference.