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Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India

Online ISBN:
9780190492175
Print ISBN:
9780190264918
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India

Sanjay Ruparelia
Sanjay Ruparelia
New School
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Published online:
21 January 2016
Published in print:
1 October 2015
Online ISBN:
9780190492175
Print ISBN:
9780190264918
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book investigates the rise and fall of the broader parliamentary left, and the dynamics of national coalition governments, in modern Indian democracy. Since the 1970s, socialist, communist and regional parties in India have sought to forge a progressive “third force.” Most scholars typically dismiss its principal manifestations—the Janata Party, National Front and United Front—as inherently opportunistic coalitions of power-seeking politicians. Employing a variety of methods and resources, including the rare confidential testimonies of key political actors, this book provides a fine-grained analytic narrative to challenge prevailing wisdom. The politics of each governing coalition, despite their self-evident flaws and short-lived tenures, revealed the outlines of a distinctive national vision. Analyzing the politics of coalition in India afresh, moreover, yields wider theoretical insights. Competing partisan interests and formal institutional arrangements, as existing scholarship and coalition theory rightly emphasize, shape important outcomes. Yet most studies fail to analyze how multiparty governments actually function. Hence they overstate the stability of and polarity between multiple political motivations, and discount internal party debates over whether to share power, with whom and to what extent, and how. In such circumstances, the strategies, tactics and choices of actors become especially significant. The pursuit of power in a highly regionalized federal parliamentary democracy creates incentives to forge national coalition governments, yet paradoxically decreases their chances of surviving. Ultimately, the failure of socialists and communists to exercise better political judgment regarding their real historical possibilities at key junctures led to the decline of the broader Indian left.

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