GS Paper 2
Syllabus: Pressure Groups & Formal/informal Associations & Their Role in Polity
Source: TH
Context: 24 years after its formation, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) split over the question of succession.
Similar cases:
- The Shiv Sena, Samajwadi Party (SP) have gone through this churn.
- The Biju Janata Dal (BJD) seems poised to undergo this churn.
The rise of regional parties in India:
- It coincided with the decline of Congress in the 1990s.
- They were basically caste-based alignments, with the Mandal movement providing the necessary prompt.
Characteristics of regional parties in India:
- Have a regional agenda (concentrates on regional or local matters) and recognise a distinct religious, ethnic, cultural or linguistic group.
- The electoral ground is restricted to a specific state or region.
Reasons for succession battles in several regional parties in India today:
- Have become ‘Hindu undivided families’: Consisting of all those who have directly descended from a common ancestor as well as their wives and unmarried daughters.
- Have given up their larger purpose:
- Many of these parties began with the goals of promoting sub-nationalism, protecting their own caste or ethnicity and larger federal interests (DMK).
- But over a period of time, they have all become parties strangled in family feuds.
- Have a centralised party structure, low intra-party democracy, and are often controlled by a single family.
- Have not evolved with time: There is splintering within castes and caste identity itself has gone through a lot of change.
- The ideological divide is thinning, forcing everybody to go beyond family, caste, or ethnic loyalty to create a larger purpose.
Implications of these succession battles: With the decline of regional parties, the challenges to a dominant party system will reduce.
Challenges for regional parties:
- The paradox about regional parties is that the family is central to their survival, but the family is also a liability.
- Absence of charismatic leaders: For example, for the BJD, who will be the leader after Naveen Patnaik is a worrying question.
Way ahead:
- The regional parties have to come up with an internal decision-making process for anointing the next leader.
- These regional parties can have a think tank (like RSS for BJP) that sits as the arbitrator to look for an alternative when required.
Insta Links:
Mains Links:
“The Indian party system is passing through a phase of transition which looks to be full of contradictions and paradoxes.” Discuss. (UPSC 2016)
