Deinstitutionalization of the Congress ‘party system’ in Indian competitive politics

Abstract

The conference in Poona that led to the foundation of Indian National Congress in 1885 aimed to serve as the germ of a native parliament to provide a reply to the assertion that India was still unfit for any form of representative institution. It spearheaded the Indian independence movement and post 1947 ushered in a ‘Congress system’ of one-party dominance that represented a historical consensus with few parallels in any political party system in the world. Dialectical contradiction has been a historic recurrence in the Congress as ‘personality cults’ of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi in the early years and a ‘high command culture’ later on decimated its hegemonic power in competitive party politics. The Congress declined due to a deficit of political vision, lack of forward-thinking ideas, engagement in competitive pseudo-secularism and diminishing electoral returns of dynastic (Nehru-Gandhi) politics. The institutionalization of BJP as a dominant party in 2014 coincided with the deinstitutionalization of the Congress party system. The grand old party needs to relegitimize itself by revamping its ideology, formulating a populist model of governance, creating son-of-the-soil leadership, revitalizing the party system, re-engaging with citizens, altering its politics to meritocracy and embracing new age electoral grammar.

The Creation and Withdrawal of Spaces for Participatory Governance: The Case of Village Development Committees in West Bengal, India

“…Mamata Banerjee's political career had started as a student leader of the Indian National Congress: she had founded the TMC herself, and her party was also marked by the personality cult and centralized leadership that were written into the organizational structure of the Congress party. 81 She therefore had no qualms as chief minister in taking up a World Bank program providing far more extensive funding than that offered by DFID to improve the technological capacity of the panchayats. 82 Within this program's vision, cleaning up corruption did not occur through local government officials sitting in public meetings alongside the most marginalized people in their areas and debating their needs and priorities.…”