As the recent round of elections to the legislative assemblies of four states in India reconfirm the decline of the dominant-party system, it is time to reflect on its implications and on the possible mechanics of the multi-party arrangement that has replaced it.
Once upon a time, when independent India was young and "security" meant whether there were enough snacks for the crowds who visited the prime minister on his birthday, political scientists talked about a "dominant-party system." It was their way of trying to sum up how India's unprecedented experiment in government worked.
What needed explaining by the early 1960s was a system that had carried out three national general elections, bringing more voters to polling booths than anywhere before in history. It was a system that regularly elected the same party to government both nationally and in most of its federal units. Yet it was a system in which rival parties survived and occasionally won state elections. It was not a one-party state as most of the ex-colonial world was becoming. It was not a totalitarian state, as Nazi Germany had been, the Soviet Union was and the People's Republic of China was trying to be. And it was not the Democrats-and-Republicans, Labour- and-Conservatives, two-party system that English speakers were familiar with.
The Congress Party seemed to embody many of India's peculiarities, and in those days of bipolar struggles between Free Worlds and Evil Empires, it was difficult to contemplate what would happen to India without "one-party dominance." How could such a disparate entity — such a functioning anarchy — endure without a dominant party? The dominant party provided the umbrella under which representatives of various regional interests could shelter, fight, fall out, come back, but, on the whole, resolve difference. Under a strong Prime Minister, the dominant party kept the Indian ship of state from breaking up in the high seas of poverty, class conflict, caste divisions, language rivalry, religious animosity and all the rest.