PARTY AND PARTY SYSTEM IN INDIA

ERA OF ONE-PARTY DOMINANCE

CHALLENGE OF BUILDING DEMOCRACY
 Newly independent countries faced with great difficulties and the leaders believed that democracy
will introduce differences and conflicts.
 Therefore many of the countries that gained freedom from colonialism experienced non-
democratic rule
 But the leaders of the newly independent India decided to take the more difficult path
 Our leaders were conscious of the critical role of politics in any democracy.
 They did not see politics as a problem; they saw it as a way of solving the problems.
 The Constitution had laid down the rules, now the machine had to be put in place.
 The Election Commission of India was set up in January 1950.
 Sukumar Sen became the first Chief Election Commissioner.
CHALLENGES-
 Holding an election required delimitation or drawing the boundaries of the electoral
constituencies.
 It also required preparing the electoral rolls, or the list of all the citizens eligible to vote.
 When the first draft of the rolls was published, it was discovered that the names of nearly 40 lakh
women were not recorded in the list.
 The Election Commission refused to accept these entries and ordered a revision if possible and
deletion if necessary.
 At that time there were 17 crore eligible voters, who had to elect about 3,200 MLAs and 489
Members of Lok Sabha.
 Only 15 per cent of these eligible voters were literate, which has made the task more difficult.
 The Election Commission trained over 3 lakh officers and polling staff to conduct the elections.
 It was not just the size of the country and the electorate that made
 The first general election was also the first big test of democracy in a poor and illiterate country
 By that time many countries in Europe had not given voting rights to all women.
PROCESS-
 After two postponements, election were finally held from October 1951 to February 1952.
 It took six months for the campaigning, polling and counting to be completed.
 Elections were competitive – there were on an average more than four candidates for each seat.
 More than half the eligible voters turned out to vote on the day of elections.
CONCLUSION-
 India’s general election of 1952 became a landmark in the history of democracy all over the world.
 It was no longer possible to argue that democratic elections could not be held in conditions of
poverty or lack of education.
 It proved that democracy could be practiced anywhere in the world.

THE CONGRESS DOMINANCE IN THE FIRST THREE GENERAL ELECTIONS

 In the first General Election the party won 364 of the 489 seats in the first Lok Sabha and finished
way ahead of any other challenger.
 The Communist Party of India that came next in terms of seats won only 16 seats.`
 In state elections party scored victory. It won a majority of seats in all the states except
Travancore-Cochin (part of today’s Kerala), Madras and Orissa.
 Finally even in these states the Congress formed the government. So the party ruled all over the
country at the national and the state level.
  In the second and the third general elections, held in 1957 and 1962 respectively, the Congress
maintained the same position in the Lok Sabha by winning three-fourth of the seats.371/494 and
361/494
 None of the opposition parties could win even one-tenth of the number of seats won by the
Congress.
 In the state assembly elections, the Congress did not get majority in a few cases.
 The most significant of these cases was in Kerala in 1957

ROLE OF ELECTION SYSTEM IN THE VISTORY OF THE CONGRESS-

 The Congress won three out of every four seats but it did not get even half of the votes.
 In 1952, for example, the Congress obtained 45 per cent of the total votes. But it managed to win
74 per cent of the seats.
 The Socialist Party, the second largest party in terms of votes, secured more than 10 per cent of the
votes all over the country. But it could not even win three per cent of the seats.
 India adopted First Past the post System.
 In this system, the party that gets more votes than others tends to get much more than its
proportional share. That is exactly what worked in favour of the Congress.
 The non-Congress votes were divided between different rival parties and candidates. So the
Congress was still way ahead of the opposition and managed to win.

NATURE OF CONGRESS DOMINANCE

 India is not the only country to have experienced the dominance of one party.
 If we look around the world, we find many other examples of one-party dominance. Difference
between these and the Indian experience.
 In the rest of the cases the dominance of one party was ensured by compromising democracy.
 In some countries like China, Cuba and Syria the constitution permits only a single party to rule the
country.
 Some others like Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt, and Eritrea are effectively one-party states due to legal
and military measures.
 Until a few years ago, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan were also effectively one-party dominant
states.

REASONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE CONGRESS-

FIRST
 The roots of this extraordinary success of the Congress party go back to the legacy of the freedom
struggle.
 Congress was seen as inheritor of the national movement.
SECOND
 The Congress was already a very well-organised party and by the time the other parties could even
think of a strategy, the Congress had already started its campaign.
 Many parties were formed only around independence or after that. Thus, the Congress had the
‘first off the blocks’ advantage.
THIRD
 By the time of independence the party had not only spread across the length and breadth of the
country
 As we had seen in the maps but also had an organisational network down to the local level.
 It was the only party then to have an organisation spread all over the country.
FOURTH
 Since the days of Independent struggle,its nature was all-inclusive.
FIFTH
 And finally, in Jawaharlal Nehru, the party had the most popular and charismatic leader in Indian
politics. He led the Congress campaign and toured through the country.
Congress as social and ideological coalition
 Congress evolved from its origins in 1885 as a pressure group for the newly educated, professional
and commercial classes to a mass movement in the twentieth century.
 With every civil disobedience movement it launched, its social base widened.
 It brought together diverse groups, whose interests were often contradictory.
 Peasants and industrialists, urban dwellers and villagers, workers and owners, middle, lower and
upper classes and castes, all found space in the Congress.
 Gradually its leadership also expanded beyond the upper caste and upper class professionals to
agriculture based leaders with a rural orientation.
 By the time of independence, the Congress was transformed into a rainbow-like social coalition
broadly representing India’s diversity in terms of classes and castes, religions and languages and
various interests.
 Many of these groups merged their identity within the Congress.
 In this sense the Congress was an ideological coalition as well. It accommodated the revolutionary
and pacifist, conservative and radical, extremist and moderate and the right, left and all shades of
the centre.
Tolerance and management of factions
 Firstly, a coalition accommodates all those who join it. Therefore, it has to avoid any extreme
position and strike a balance on almost all issues.
 Compromise and inclusiveness are the hallmarks of a coalition.
 It left the opposition with no agenda as all voices found place in congress strategy.
 Secondly, in a party that has the nature of a coalition, there is a greater tolerance of internal
differences and ambitions of various groups and leaders are accommodated.
 Its pre-independence nature continued. So group with different ideology remained within the
congress and made what we call factions.
 The coalitional nature of the Congress party tolerated and in fact encouraged various factions.
 Some of these factions were based on ideological considerations but very often these factions were
rooted in personal ambitions and rivalries.
 It meant that leaders representing different interests and ideologies remained within the Congress
rather than go out and form a new party.
 The system of factions functioned as balancing mechanism within the ruling party.
 Political competition therefore took place within the Congress.

EMERGENCE OF OPPOSITION PARTIES

INTRODUCTION
 Hough the congress dominated the electoral system, India had a larger number of diverse and
vibrant opposition parties than many other multi-party democracies.
 Some of these parties played an important part in the politics of the country in the ’sixties and
’seventies
IMPORTANCE
 Though their presence in the lok Sabha was insignificant, yet their presence played a crucial role in
maintaining the democratic character of the system.
 These parties offered a sustained and often principled criticism of the policies and practices of the
Congress party.
 This kept the ruling party under check and often changed the balance of power within the
Congress.
 By keeping democratic political alternative alive, these parties prevented the resentment with the
system from turning anti-democratic.
  These parties also groomed the leaders who were to play a crucial role in the shaping of our
country.

NATURE
 In the early years there was a lot of mutual respect between the leaders of the Congress and those
of the opposition.
 The interim government that ruled the country after the declaration of Independence and the first
general election included opposition leaders like Dr. Ambedkar and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in
the cabinet.
 Jawaharlal Nehru often referred to his fondness for the Socialist Party and invited socialist leaders
like Jayaprakash Narayan to join his government.
CONCLUSION
 Thus this first phase of democratic politics in our country was quite unique.
 The inclusive character of the national movement led by the Congress enabled it to attract different
sections, groups and interests making it a broad based social and ideological coalition.
 As the ability of the Congress to accommodate all interests and all aspirants for political power
steadily declined, other opposition parties started gaining greater significance.

CHALLENGES TO AND RESTORATION OF THE CONGRESS SYSTEM

CHALLENGE OF POLITICAL SUCCESSION
 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru passed away in May 1964. The question of succession and the
future of democracy were the serious concerns
 The 1960s were labelled as the ‘dangerous decade’ when unresolved problems
like poverty, nequality, communal and regional divisions etc. could lead to a failure
of the democratic project or even the disintegration of the country.
FROM NEHRU TO SHASTRI
 When Nehru passed away, K. Kamraj, the president of the Congress party consulted party leaders
and Congress members of Parliament and found that there was a consensus in favour of Lal
Bahadur Shastri.
 Shastri was a non-controversial leader from Uttar Pradesh who had been a Minister in Nehru’s
cabinet for many years.
 He was known for his simplicity and his commitment to principles.
 Earlier he had resigned from the position of Railway Minister accepting moral responsibility for a
major railway accident
TENURE
 While India was still recovering from the economic implications of the war with China, failed
monsoons, drought and serious food crisis presented a grave challenge
 The country also faced a war with Pakistan in 1965. Shastri’s famous slogan ‘Jai Jawan Jai Kisan’,
symbolised the country’s resolve to face both these challenges.
 Shastri’s Prime Ministership came to an abrupt end on 10 January 1966, when he suddenly expired
in Tashkent after signing a peace treaty with Pakistan-
FROM SHASTRI TO INDIRA
 The Congress faced the challenge of political succession for the second time in two years.
 This time there was an intense competition between Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi
 Morarji Desai had earlier served as Chief Minister of Bombay state
 Indira Gandhi, had been Congress President in the past and had also been Union Minister for
Information in the Shastri cabinet.
 Senior leaders backed Indira but it was not unanimous, so the decision was taken through secret
ballot.
  Indira Gandhi defeated Morarji Desai by securing the support of more than two-thirds of the
party’s MPs.
 The senior Congress leaders may have supported Indira Gandhi in the belief that her administrative
and political inexperience would compel her to be dependent on them for support and guidance.
 She had to lead the party in a Lok Sabha election. Around this time, the economic situation in the
country had further deteriorated, adding to her problems.
FOURTH GENERAL ELECTIONS, 1967
Context of the elections-time preceding the elections
 In the years leading up to the fourth general elections, the country witnessed major changes.
Death of two PMs in quick succession.
 the period was fraught with grave economic crisis resulting from successive failure of monsoons,
widespread drought,
a. decline in agricultural production,
b. serious food shortage, depletion of
c. foreign exchange reserves, drop in
d. industrial production and exports,
e. combined with a sharp rise in military expenditure and
f. diversion of resources from planning and economic development.
 One of the first decisions of the Indira Gandhi government was to devaluate the Indian rupee,
under what was seen to be pressure from the US.
 People started protesting against the increase in prices of essential commodities, food scarcity,
growing unemployment and the overall economic condition in the country.
 The government attitude further increased public bitterness and reinforced popular unrest.
 The communist and socialist parties launched struggles for greater equality. Armed agrarian
movements also launched.
 This period also witnessed some of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots since independence
NON-CONGERSSSIM
 Opposition parties were in the forefront of organising public protests and pressurising the
government. Parties opposed to the Congress realised that the division of their votes kept the
Congress in power
 So parties with ideology got together to form anti-Congress fronts in some states and entered into
Electoral adjustments of sharing seats in others.
 The socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia gave this strategy the name of ‘non-Congressism’.
 He also produced a theoretical argument in its defence: Congress rule was undemocratic and
opposed to the interests of ordinary poor people; therefore, the coming together of the non-
Congress parties was necessary for reclaiming democracy for the people
ELECTORAL VERDICT
 The results jolted the Congress at both the national and state levels. Many contemporary political
observers described the election results as a ‘political earthquake
 The Congress did manage to get a majority in the Lok Sabha, but with its lowest tally of seats and
share of votes since 1952.
 The political stalwarts who lost in their constituencies included Kamaraj in Tamil Nadu, S.K. Patil in
Maharashtra, Atulya Ghosh in West Bengal and K. B. Sahay in Bihar.
 The Congress lost majority in as many as seven States. In two other States defections prevented it
from forming a government.
 Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Madras and Kerala.
 In Madras State (now called Tamil Nadu), a regional party — the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
(DMK) – came to power by securing a clear majority.
 This was the first time any non-Congress party had secured a majority of its own in any State.
COALITIONS
 Since no single party had got majority, various non- Congress parties came together to form joint
legislative parties (called Samyukt Vidhayak Dal in Hindi) that supported non-Congress
governments.
 The SVD government in Bihar, for instance, included the two socialist parties – SSP and the PSP –
along with the CPI on the left and Jana Sangh on the right.
 In Punjab it was called the ‘Popular United Front’ and comprised the two rival Akali parties at that
time – Sant group and the Master group – with Both the communist parties – the CPI and the
CPI(M), the SSP, the Republican Party and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
DEFECTION
 Another important feature of the politics after the 1967 election was the role played by defections
in the making and unmaking of governments
 Defection means an elected representative leaves the party on whose symbol he/she was elected
and joins another party.
 The constant realignments and shifting political loyalties in this period gave rise to the expression
‘Aya Ram, Gaya Ram’.

THE STORY OF ‘AYA RAM, GAYA RAM’

 The expression originated in an amazing feat of floor crossing achieved by Gaya Lal, an MLA in
Haryana, in1967.
 He changed his party thrice in a fortnight, from Congress to United Front, back to Congress and
then within nine hours to United Front again!
 It is said that when Gaya Lal declared his intention to quit the United Front and join the Congress,
the Congress leader, Rao Birendra Singh brought him to Chandigarh press and declared “Gaya Ram
was now Aya Ram”.
SPILIT IN THE CONGRESS
 The e1967 elections showed the vulnerability of the Congress and it was now clear that it could be
defeated. However not many non-congress state governments survived.
 Yet the factionalism with in the Congress was at its peak.
INDIRA VS SYNDICATE
 The real challenge to Indira Gandhi came not from the opposition but from
within her own party.
 She had to deal with the ‘syndicate’, a group of powerful and influential leaders
from within the Congress.
 The Syndicate had played a role in the installation of Indira Gandhi as the Prime
Minister.
 These leaders expected Indira Gandhi to follow their advise.
 Gradually, however, Indira Gandhi attempted to assert her position within the
government and the party.
 She chose her trusted group of advisers from outside the party. Slowly and
carefully, she side lined the Syndicate.
 To deal with the new challenge of syndicate and reverse her electoral defeat,
she adopted a very bold strategy. She converted a simple power struggle into
an ideological struggle.
 She launched a series of initiatives to give the government policy a Left
orientation.
 She got the Congress Working Committee to adopt a Ten Point Programme
in May 1967.
  This programme included social control of banks, nationalisation of General
Insurance, ceiling on urban property and income, public distribution of food
grains, land reforms and provision of house sites to the rural poor.

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 1969

 The factional rivalry between the Syndicate and Indira Gandhi came in the open in 1969. Following
President Zakir Hussain’s death, the post of President of the India fell vacant that year.
 The syndicate managed to nominate her long time opponent and then speaker of the Lok Sabha, N.
Sanjeeva Reddy, as the official Congress candidate for the ensuing Presidential elections.
 Indira Gandhi retaliated by encouraging the then Vice-President, V.V. Giri, to file his nomination as
an independent candidate.
 She also announced several big and popular policy measures like the nationalisation of fourteen
leading private banks and the abolition of the ‘privy purse’ or the special privileges given to former
princes.
 Morarji Desai was the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. He quit the post.
 The then Congress President S. Nijalingappa issued a ‘whip’ asking all the Congress MPs and MLAs
to vote in favour of Sanjeeva Reddy,
 After silently supporting V.V. Giri, the Prime Minister openly called for a ‘conscience vote’ which
meant that the MPs and MLAs from the Congress should be free to vote the way they want. The
election ultimately resulted in the victory of V.V. Giri, the independent candidate, and the defeat of
Sanjeeva Reddy, the official Congress candidate

SPILIT
 The Congress President expelled the Prime Minister from the party; she claimed that her group was
the real Congress.
 The Congress group led by the ‘syndicate’ came to be referred to as the Congress (Organisation)
and the group led by Indira Gandhi came to be called the Congress (Requisitionists).
 These two parties were also described as Old Congress and New Congress.
 Indira Gandhi projected the split as an ideological divide between socialists and conservatives,
between the pro-poor and the pro-rich.

THE 1971 ELECTION AND RESTORATION OF CONGRESS

 After the spilt the Gandhi government lost the majority, given support by the DMK
 During this period the government made conscious attempts to project its socialist credentials. This
was also a phase when Indira Gandhi vigorously campaigned for implementing the existing land
reform laws and undertook further land ceiling legislation
 The fifth general election to Lok Sabha were held in February 1971.
CONTEST
 The new Congress was just one faction of an already weak party. Everyone believed that the real
organisational strength of the Congress party was under the command of Congress(O).
 To make matters worse for Indira Gandhi, all the major non-communist, non- Congress opposition
parties formed an electoral alliance known as the Grand Alliance. The SSP, PSP, Bharatiya Jana
Sangh, Swatantra Party and the Bharatiya Kranti Dal came together
 Yet the new Congress had something that its big opponents lacked – it had an issue, an agenda and
a positive slogan.
 The Grand Alliance did not have a coherent political programme.
 Indira Gandhi said that the opposition alliance had only one common programme: Indira
Hatao (Remove Indira).
 In contrast to this, she put forward a positive programme captured in the famous slogan: Garibi
Hatao
  Through garibi hatao Indira Gandhi tried to generate a support base among the disadvantaged,
especially among the landless labourers, Dalits and Adivasis, minorities, women and the
unemployed youth.
 The slogan of garibi hatao and the programmes that followed it were part of Indira Gandhi’s
political strategy of building an independent nationwide political support base.
THE OUTCOME AND AFTER
 The Congress(R)-CPI alliance won more seats and votes than the Congress had ever won in the first
four general elections.
 The combine won 375 seats in Lok Sabha and secured 48.4 per cent votes. Indira Gandhi’s
Congress(R) won 352 seats with about 44 per cent of the popular votes on its own.
 Congress(O): the party with so many stalwarts could get less than one-fourth of the votes secured
by Indira Gandhi’s party and win merely 16 seats
 The Grand Alliance of the opposition proved a grand failure. Their combined tally of seats was less
than 40.
 The incidents followed the election further enhanced her popularity. Her party swept through all
the State Assembly elections held in 1972.

RESTORATION? WAS THIS RESTORATION OF THE OLD CONGRESS SYSTEM?

 In many ways she had re-invented the party. The party occupied a similar position in terms of its
popularity as in the past. But it was a different kind of a party.
 It relied entirely on the popularity of the supreme leader. I
 It had a somewhat weak organisational structure.
 This Congress party now did not have many factions, thus it could not accommodate all kinds of
opinions and interests.
 It depended more on some social groups: the poor, the women, Dalits, Adivasis and the minorities.
 Despite being more popular, the new
 Congress did not have the kind of capacity to absorb all tensions and conflicts that the Congress
system was known for.
 While the Congress consolidated its position and Indira Gandhi assumed a position of
unprecedented political authority, the spaces for democratic expression of people’s aspirations
actually shrank.

CLASS –XII SUBJECT – POL SC

Challenges to and Restoration of Congress System.
1. Why is 1960s called a dangerous decade in the political history of India? 1
2. Who was the congress president when Nehru passed away? 1
3. What were the two challenges faced by shastri? 2
4. What is defection and explain the expression “aya ram,gaya ram” 2
5. What happened at Tashkent? 2
6. Why did Indra Gandhi face problems in the initial years? 2
7. What do you mean by non congressism? 2
8. Why 1967 elections were describe as political earthquake by many? 2
9. Name the political stalwarts of congress who lost 1967 elections? 2
10. Name two northern and two southern states were congress lost assembly polls of 1967?2
11. Name the state where a non-congress party secured a majority of its own in 1967? Name the party
also? 2
12. Explain the statement “the elections of 1967 brought into picture the phenomenon of coalition”?
4
13. Explain the reasons for the popularity of Indira Gandhi before the elections of 1971. 4
14. Discuss the major issue led to the formal split of the congress party in 1969. 4
15. It was not the real congress which one in 1971 election under the leadership of Indira Gandhi.
Justify. 6