Political parties are among the most visible institutions in a democracy. For most ordinary citizens, democracy is virtually equal to political parties. This chapter takes a close look at the nature and working of political parties, especially in India, by addressing key questions: Why do we need parties? How many parties are good for a democracy? What are the national and regional parties in India? What challenges do they face, and how can they be reformed?
A political party is a group of people who come together to contest elections and hold power in the government. They agree on some policies and programmes for the society with a view to promote the collective good.
Parties reflect fundamental political divisions in a society and involve partisanship (a tendency to take a side and inability to take a balanced view on an issue). A political party has three core components:
Political parties perform a series of crucial functions in a democracy:
We need political parties because they perform all these essential functions. Without political parties, every candidate in an election would be independent. No one would be able to make major policy promises to the people, the utility of the government would remain uncertain, and no single entity would be responsible for how the country is run as a whole. The rise of political parties is directly linked to the emergence of representative democracies in large and complex societies.
Different countries have evolved different party systems based on their historical and social contexts:
When several parties in a multi-party system join hands for the purpose of contesting elections and winning power, it is called an alliance or a front. In India, major alliances include:
Every party in India must register with the Election Commission. The Commission lays down detailed criteria for a party to be recognized as a State or National party:
Most of the major parties of the country are classified by the Election Commission as State parties, commonly referred to as regional parties. However, they need not be regional in their ideology or outlook. Parties like the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal have national-level political organizations with units in several states. Over the last three decades, the expansion of state parties has made the Parliament of India politically more diverse, making coalition governments at the Centre a necessity from 1996 to 2014.
Popular dissatisfaction and criticism focus on four major problem areas in the working of political parties:
Parties can also be reformed through public pressure (petitions, publicity, and agitations by pressure groups, media, and citizens) and direct participation (more people joining political parties to improve the quality of democracy from within).