Draft: not for quotation Globalised Economy and Localised Politics: Exploring the New Trends in the Indian Party System

While the economy in India is getting globalised, politics-- and therefore the party system-- is getting regionalised and localised. There seems to be a symbiotic relationship between economy and politics in India. Delineating the influence of economic environment on politics can perhaps explain the significant changes in India’s political parties and party system during the last couple of decades. These changes are not simply confined to the number of parties or their relative strength. It is a qualitative transformation in the role of political parties.1 A party is an institutionalised response to the prevailing values in the civil society. These values, especially the way an individual or a group locates its role as a constitutive element of political community, are getting radically transformed. There has been a process of fragmentation of India’s civil society, in terms of both territorial and social spaces. Economic environment is an important determinant of the nature of civil society and the democratic process.2 It is our hypothesis that India’s policy on economic reform acted as a catalyst in bringing about the transformations in civil society, political process and the party system.3 This paper is an attempt to take a fresh look at the nature of party system in India, especially in the wake of the policy of economic liberalisation. Though we focus on the transformation since the 1989 elections, our goal is to assess the continuities and changes in the party system during the 1990s. In the next section we present a synoptic review of the literature on the party system since India’s independence. The second section is devoted to a theoretical analysis of the possible relationship between economic reform and a party system. The subsequent three sections contain what we consider to be the three aspects of transformation in the party system in India: ideological depolarisation of parties, regionalisation of the party system and the fragmentation of the party system. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of the implications of these new trends for the Indian political system