Coalition Politics in North India

The years 1964 and 1967 stand as two crucial landmarks in the democratic development of India's political systems both at the center and in the several states. In the three years since Nehru's death in May, 1964, Indian politics entered fully into a major test of legitimacy. Since 1964, the national leadership of the Indian National Congress has three times demonstrated its ability to handle smoothly the first stage of India's process of legitimizing democratic political authority—that of transferring power from a charismatic leader to his successors within the dominant party. After the 1967 General Elections, Indian politics moved to a second stage to confront the problems of transferring power from the previously dominant Congress to diverse parties and party coalitions in more than half the Indian states.The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications for party development in India of the ways in which power has been transferred from the Congress to multi-group coalitions in the three north Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. Specifically, I am concerned with the structural characteristics of the developing party systems in the three states; with the roles played in the systems by parties, factions, and individuals; and with the impact of the ways in which the systems function upon government formation and stability. I will argue that north Indian political parties operate in systems in which inter-party ideological divisions are less decisive in the formation and breakup of governments than intra-party divisions.