The unprecedented mandate in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2016 Assembly elections in Assam necessitates a careful understanding of the growth and consolidation of the party in the state. The BJP’s rise in the state can be understood in the backdrop of a favourable social base which has perceivably shifted from the Congress in recent years. Many factors have been responsible for this shift identifiable through a withering Congress dominance and political stagnancy of the AGP. An understanding of the political shift in Assam with the concomitant rise of the BJP is incomplete without a look into the party movement dialectics marking BJP politics. A blatantly vocal Hindutva rhetoric has been cast aside opting instead for a regionalized portraiture of Hinduism in the state. In this, localized sects and symbols have been inducted into the BJP’s campaign which infused a strong sense of regional identification among the mass of electorate.

Although the Indian Parliament has witnessed progressive democratization in terms of representation of various sections of society, it has declined as an effective institution of accountability. Unlike in Western democracies, the decline of Indian parliament is not due to strengthening of the executive. Ironically both the executive and the parliament in India have remained weak during the ‘democratic upsurge’ era, while some non-parliamentary institutions have succeeded in asserting their autonomy. We find that existing literature on Indian parliament fails in explaining the paradox of declining parliamentary performance amidst its democratization. In this article, we highlight five such paradoxes. We bring in political parties as the main explanatory variable and argue that the changing character of political parties during the ‘democratic upsurge’ era in India lies at the heart of this debate: the emergence of new players representing sectional interests though increased representation of various sections of society, yet adversarial politics among these parties led to parliament’s decline.

Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Anupama Roy. Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. 2019. 366 pages. ₹1,100.

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