India Culture, Business, Sports and Food. Get all the buzz in India now

The parliament of India, a building in light Redstone is spread in the diameter of 2 kms. In the decades of 70’s and 80’s, in the outer circle of the Parliament, all those big rooms held the name plates of Congress ministers. If you go there now, you will find that there are names like Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Sharad Pawar, A. Raja, Anbumani Ramadoss and Raguvansh Prasad Singh etc- people who have nothing to do with Congress. This would describe you the deep impact occurred due to the shifting of tectonic plates in politics of India.

India is no longer wearing the congress variety of tricolor. Today there are more than 20 shades which includes blue, red, saffron, green and yellow. There are 37 parties which we together know as government of India. Of course majority of them are the regional parties who have presence are not more than 2 states at the maximum. This change in the political arena has also gripped the states. There are smaller parties who are there because of their roots in caste or religion, are in power in most of the states.

In 1952 elections, 27 regional political parties got just 16 seats against the congress’s 339 in the House of 466. In 2004 elections, congress managed to get 151 seats and 26 regional parties won 126 seats. The party which once ruled in 20 of the 24 states in 1982 has its presence in 2007, in just 12 out of 29 states. This tells another story of political mutation.

Why can’t we get a single political party to rule? This would also ensure political stability. Well, on one hand we have Congress party which failed to retain its regional big daddies, on the other hand is the Janta Party which managed to disintegrate into more than half a dozen small parties. We now have local but powerful caste leaders like Ajit Singh, Lalu, Paswan, Mayawati, Mulayam and Gawda to name a few.  Even BJP, which one gave some hope by ruling the nation for six years, could not manage to stop regional resurgence.

The leadership famine being faced by both the Congress and BJP, the nation is unlikely to get a single party government in the near future. We may say it is only after 60 years of Indian Independence that India has become a true federation of states in which various castes, religions and other identities and aspirations have found their legitimate place in the ruling establishment.