Publication

This paper discusses the steady emergence of a large number of non-national parties in India's domestic politics and the electoral process and their impact on the 15th general elections. The author finds that a fragmented and fractured polity with regional and state actors wielding significant bargaining power with the national parties has decisively changed the structure, nature and outcome of Indian elections since the 1990s. So has the rise of regional parties and the concomitant decline in vote shares of the national parties resulted in the growth of coalition governments, the author notes.