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In May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed the first single-party majority in the lower house of India’s parliament (the Lok Sabha) in three decades. The BJP’s victory, spearheaded by the party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, ushered in a debate among political scientists and political analysts over whether the country’s electoral politics was experiencing a paradigm shift. Indian politics was synonymous with coalition politics between 1989 and 2014, following decades of Congress Party dominance at the national level; but for that quarter century, no single party was strong enough to earn a parliamentary majority on its own, relying instead on dozens of pre- and post-election allies to form a governing coalition.

The BJP’s breakthrough in 2014, therefore, prompted a debate about whether India had left the era of multipolarity, fragmentation, and coalitions behind in favor of a new, dominant-party system in which the BJP assumed the role of central pole that the Congress had once played. Political scientists were starkly divided in their assessments. Some scholars downplayed the magnitude of the 2014 electoral verdict. “From the perspective of the vote shares won by the country’s main political parties, not as much has changed as the news headlines might suggest,” wrote Adam Ziegfeld.¹ Another assessment, penned by Rekha Diwakar, concluded that “although the Congress decline has continued, and the BJP has won many recent state assembly elections, it is premature to conclude that the Indian party system has shifted to a BJP-dominated one.”²

Other scholars were less hesitant in asserting that India was witnessing the birth of a new party system. In the Journal of Democracy, E. Sridharan wrote: “The results were dramatic, possibly even epochal. The electoral patterns of the last quarter-century have undergone a sea change, and the world’s largest democracy now has what appears to be a new party system headed by a newly dominant party.”³ Similarly, Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma noted that with its historic victory, “the BJP has clearly replaced the Congress as the system-defining party” and would likely become the “focal point of electoral alignment and re-alignment” in India.⁴

Finally, some took cognizance of the winds of change, but were unwilling to make strong claims in light of a single data point. For instance, Milan Vaishnav and Danielle Smogard concluded their assessment of the 2014 results by noting that if the trends persist, “India may well have closed the book on twenty-five years of electoral politics and moved into a new era.”⁵ In the same vein, Louise Tillin remarked that the extant evidence is “somewhat equivocal as to whether the 2014 elections mark a departure in longer term electoral patterns or the consolidation of a new social bloc behind the BJP.”⁶

The reasons for the divergence in expert assessments are easy to decipher. In addition to the difficulty of rendering definitive judgments based on a single election, the BJP’s victory in 2014 relied on near-total sweeps of a relatively small number of states in the Indian union; in fact, 75 percent of the BJP’s parliamentary tally in 2014 came from just eight states in the north, west, and central regions of the country.⁷ Second, although the BJP clinched a majority in the Lok Sabha, it was nowhere close to a majority in India’s upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha. This is crucial, as both houses must provide their assent if a bill is to become law. Finally, the BJP’s reach was limited at the level of India’s states, which are in many ways the most important sites of everyday governance. Prior to the 2014 election, the BJP ruled just five (of twenty-nine) states⁸—below even its previous high of seven states (achieved in 2012).⁹

In the wake of the 2019 general election results, which come on the back of significant political changes at the level of India’s states, there is empirical support for more unequivocal judgments. Indeed, the available evidence points in one direction: 2014 was not an aberration; it was instead a harbinger of a new era.¹⁰ India does appear to have ushered in a new, fourth party system—one that is premised on a unique set of political principles and that shows a clear break with what came before. In the 2019 general election, the BJP did the unthinkable: the party clinched a second consecutive majority in the Lok Sabha, a feat that was last accomplished by the Congress Party in 1980 and 1984.

While most political analysts expected the BJP to return to power with relative ease, very few anticipated the magnitude of the victory. The BJP won 303 seats (out of 543) in the Lok Sabha, while its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won a whopping 353 seats in total.¹¹ In cruising to victory, the BJP bested its historic 2014 performance in which it earned 282 seats on its own while its alliance clinched 336 seats in all. Conversely, the result produced yet another disappointment for the opposition Indian National Congress, which won a paltry 52 seats (just 8 better than its 2014 total).

The BJP has methodically expanded its footprint in India’s states as well. As of June 2019, the party controls twelve states while its allies control another six.¹² This represents a qualitative leap from its national reach just five years ago. Furthermore, the party made significant gains in the Rajya Sabha; at the time of writing, the BJP occupies 80 seats to the Congress’ 48.¹³ The BJP’s allies control another 31 while other parties control the remaining 80 seats.¹⁴ If current trends continue, the NDA could seal a majority in the 245-member body as soon as late 2020.

This paper outlines some of the fundamental principles of India’s fourth electoral system. It begins with a review of India’s three previous electoral orders, drawing on the seminal work of Yogendra Yadav. It then reviews the basic principles of the third party system and demonstrates how recent elections violate many of the commonly accepted tenets associated with the status quo. Namely, in the third party system, no national party served as the central gravitational force organizing politics. Electoral politics was marked by increasing party fragmentation, intensifying political competition, and a federalization of national politics. Furthermore, national voter turnout appeared to be relatively stagnant, painting a stark contrast with rising turnout in state elections—a signal that states had become the primary venues of political contestation as opposed to national-level politics. Finally, the third party system was characterized by a changing composition of political elites in which lower castes—Dalits (Scheduled Castes, or SCs) as well as Other Backward Classes (OBCs)—gained political representation, largely at the expense of upper and intermediate castes.

Today, many of these principles stand altered, and 2014 represents a key structural break. While the focus of much of this paper is on the attributes of political contestation, which can be derived from official electoral data compiled by the Election Commission of India, there are other perhaps less quantifiable traits that also suggest Indian electoral politics is operating according to a new set of rules. These factors include the BJP’s ideological hegemony, its organization and fundraising prowess, and its charismatic leadership (as manifest by Prime Minister Modi).

The final section asks some questions that the dawn of a new electoral system has raised for the study of Indian politics. The fact that the scale of the BJP’s 2019 general election victory caught so many political observers on the back foot suggests that this is an opportune time to question some foundational assumptions about Indian politics that have underpinned mainstream electoral analysis.

India’s Electoral Systems

There is broad consensus that India’s electoral history—from the inaugural postindependence general election in 1952 until the sixteenth Lok Sabha elections in 2014—can be roughly divided into three electoral orders. Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s leading political scientists, was among the first to provide this organizational rubric. Yadav has also argued that a new electoral system commences whenever an observer can “detect a destabilisation of [an old system] and its replacement by a new pattern of electoral outcomes as well as its determinants.”¹⁵

1952 to 1967: Congress Dominance

Between 1952 and 1967, the Congress Party dominated Indian politics, both at the center and across her states. As the party primarily responsible for winning India her independence and home to many of the most respected nationalist leaders, the Congress benefited from widespread popular appeal as the umbrella organization under which India would establish its postindependence identity. As a catchall party that sought—in theory if not always in practice—to provide a pan-Indian representation for all of India’s diverse caste, linguistic, and religious groups, the Congress Party’s penetration into Indian society was unmatched.

The inadequacies of the other players on the political scene fueled that dominance. While a raft of opposition parties keenly contested elections, opposition forces were badly fragmented, which limited their ability to mount a serious campaign to unseat the Congress. Instead, the most salient political competition often occurred between factions within the Congress Party representing different ideological viewpoints.¹⁶ Despite the party’s reputation as a big-tent party, the Congress was significantly controlled by the upper castes, who accounted for the lion’s share of its elected representatives at the state and national levels and its most prominent, visible national leaders.

1967 to 1989: Growing Opposition at the State Level

The year 1967 proved to be a critical inflection point, ushering in the dawn of India’s second party system.¹⁷ Although the Congress’s grip on power in New Delhi remained firm, its hold on India’s state capitals began to fade. With the exception of the election of 1977—when the Congress was badly punished for then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s autocratic excesses during Emergency Rule between 1975 and 1977—the party remained the default choice for governance at the center. But new expressions of caste and regional identities chipped away at the party’s monopoly of subnational politics. The 1960s gave rise to India’s “first democratic upsurge”—to borrow Yadav’s term—when populous OBC groups first mobilized to ensure that their political power was in greater alignment with their demographic weight and their increasing economic clout.¹⁸

1989 to 2014: Dawn of Coalition Politics

Whatever semblance of Congress dominance that remained after 1967 would come to an end in 1989, which denoted the start of coalition governance in New Delhi and the third party system. Although the Congress’s grasp on national power had gradually weakened in the 1960s and 1970s, by the end of the following decade it had completely given way to a multipolar constellation of forces in which the Congress was no longer the single pole around which politics revolved. Three powerful forces—often termed “Mandal, masjid, and market”—disrupted Indian politics, prompting a realignment in politics.

The first of these forces was the Mandal Commission, a government task force that recommended that OBCs be given access to quotas governing higher education seats and civil service posts. Until this point, quotas—or “reservations,” as they are known in Indian parlance—were restricted to Scheduled Castes/Dalits and Scheduled Tribes. It was on the backs of the agitation around Mandal that India witnessed what Yadav dubbed a “second democratic upsurge,” or the catapulting of traditionally disadvantaged groups into the corridors of political power.¹⁹ During this period, many caste-based parties representing Dalit and OBC interests firmly entrenched their position among the representative class.

The second force was the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, by pro-Hindu forces associated with the BJP. They sought to replace the mosque with a mandir (temple) marking the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. This ethno-nationalist mobilization helped fuel the BJP’s sudden rise from a party that won just two seats in the 1984 general election to the only national alternative to the Congress. As the successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) and a party driven by a Hindu nationalist worldview, the BJP was initially limited to the heartland of the country. Its main votaries hailed from the relatively privileged communities of Brahmins and Banias. The new political context allowed the BJP to make inroads among lower castes and extend its appeal beyond its traditional core geographies.²⁰

The third and final factor was the market, due to India’s decision to liberalize its economy in 1991, embrace the forces of globalization, and welcome global economic integration. This rupture with the past redefined the boundaries of mainstream economic discourse in India, creating both new alignments in favor of opening up as well as reactionary forces who fretted about the adverse consequences for India’s poor and its limited industrial base.

Beyond India’s Third Party System

In order to evaluate whether India has truly entered a new era of politics with the BJP’s recent general election victories in 2014 and 2019, it is necessary to clarify the precise attributes of the third party system against which any future change can be measured. Broadly speaking, there are six defining attributes of the third party system.

Principles of the Third Party System

First, the absence of a central pole in national politics between 1989 and 2009 is perhaps the central feature of the third party system. Although the Congress played that role for decades, after 1989 it no longer had the breadth and depth of support required to define the system. Although the BJP would soon emerge as the only other truly national party to give the Congress a serious fight across multiple states, it too had limitations of demography, geography, and ideology.

Second, the third party system was an era of political fragmentation. The number of parties contesting elections surged after 1989 as the Congress order broke down for good. Political entrepreneurs created new parties with abandon, hoping that earning a few seats—or even a solid vote share—would grant them newfound leverage in the coalition age.

Third, electoral contests became markedly more competitive on nearly every dimension. Victory margins came down and the share of candidates winning an outright majority of votes in their constituencies dropped. It became commonplace for candidates to emerge as victorious members of parliament (MPs) with only a plurality, as opposed to a majority, of votes in their constituency.²¹

Fourth, the entire political system became highly federalized. National elections were no longer truly national in nature; they were more akin to a collection of state-level verdicts. State and national elections also exhibited a clear, interactive pattern. National-level outcomes were directly influenced by the state-level verdicts that preceded them, but the intensity of the effect depended on the proximity of the two polls. Honeymoon and anti-incumbency effects at the state level directly impacted national polls.

Fifth, voter turnout surged at the state level while national political mobilization cooled. As states became the primary venues for political contestation, voter turnout patterns shifted in kind. In the third party system, the gap between voter turnout at the state and national levels saw unprecedented divergence.

Finally, there was a clear change in the social composition of the representative class. For instance, in northern Hindi belt states, the combined share of OBC and SC legislators superseded that of upper caste and intermediate castes for the very first time.

Discontinuities across all six of these hallmarks of the third party system were on display in the electoral outcomes of the two most recent general elections—2014 and 2019—not to mention in the shifting dynamics at the subnational level.

From Multipolarity to Unipolarity

Recall that the Congress Party fulfilled the role of a hegemon between 1952 and 1989. From 1952 to 1977, the Congress Party controlled the reins of power in New Delhi without interruption. Although the Janata coalition ousted the Congress following Indira Gandhi’s termination of a twenty-one-month period of Emergency Rule, its reign was short-lived. By 1980, the Congress Party was back in power in New Delhi and it further improved its strength in the 1984 polls in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination. As discussed earlier, there were shifts during this period at the state level, where the Congress Party’s position post-1967 sharply declined, but the Congress hold on national politics was more or less intact.

The Congress’s privileged position in New Delhi evaporated after the 1989 elections (see figure 2). Although the Congress vote share never once exceeded 50 percent, it stood at 45.8 percent in the first electoral system and dipped slightly to 43.3 percent in the second party system. Aside from the 1977 election, when the Congress vote share dipped to 34.5 percent, the party’s vote share had never fallen below 40 percent between 1952 and 1984. This was in sync with its commanding position in the broader party system. In contrast, the Congress vote share between 1989 and 2009 was only around 30.6 percent—a sharp decline from what came before.

Similarly, the BJP’s share of the vote peaked at 25.6 percent in 1998 and subsequently experienced a secular decline (see figure 3). It is hard to imagine that, just a decade ago, many observers—including some within the BJP itself—questioned whether the party had hit a plateau whose best days were behind it.²² In India’s 2009 general election, the BJP won just 116 seats and notched just 18.8 percent of the vote on its way to a second consecutive election defeat at the hands of the Congress.

In terms of aggregate electoral outcomes, the 2014 and 2019 elections stand apart. In 2014, the BJP won 282 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, while its NDA coalition partners earned another 53 seats. The tally of the incumbent Congress, on the other hand, sunk to just 44 seats—its worst electoral showing since independence (its previous low was 114 seats in 1999). This outcome was historic on several counts. First, the BJP won India’s first single-party majority in the Lok Sabha since 1984, the year the Congress Party under Rajiv Gandhi won an overwhelming mandate in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Second, 2014 was the first time in postindependence history that a single party other than the Congress had claimed a majority of seats in parliament. Third, although the BJP won a majority of seats off of just 31 percent of the vote, it exceeded its previous best performance (25.6 percent in 1998) by a significant margin. Furthermore, its allies brought the NDA’s combined vote share to 38.5 percent.²³

Headed into the 2019 race, many election analysts doubted the BJP’s ability to replicate its 2014 feat for at least four reasons.²⁴ First, the BJP’s victory was fueled by virtually running the tables in a select set of states. For the BJP to match its 2014 benchmark, analysts thought the party would have to once more sweep this relatively limited swath of territory—especially given its limited presence in the south and east of India. Given the forces of anti-incumbency present in Indian politics, a repeat of the same magnitude seemed improbable.²⁵

Second, Modi relentlessly campaigned in 2013 and 2014 on a pledge to usher in acche din (good times) for the Indian economy by generating rapid economic growth, creating millions of jobs, and revitalizing India’s moribund investment cycle.²⁶ Yet large parts of this lofty economic narrative simply did not materialize during Modi’s first term in office. Growth in India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP), while solid, was by no means stellar.²⁷ While the Modi government successfully tamed inflation—the Achilles’ heel of its predecessor—one unintended, adverse consequence was historically low growth in farm prices.²⁸ While low inflation is a boon for urban consumers, it often harms the fortunes of rural producers. As a result, rural wages had largely stagnated.²⁹ Finally, official data pointed to a slowdown in job creation. A report of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), suppressed by the government but leaked to the press, found that joblessness spiked to unprecedented levels in 2017–2018.³⁰

Third, there were nascent signs that the opposition parties had minimized, though by no means fully resolved, their coordination dilemmas.³¹ In the 2014 election, many opposition parties chose to fight the BJP on their own, as opposed to forming constructive alliances to keep the BJP at bay. As a result, in several pivotal states, divisions within the opposition served to fragment the anti-BJP vote, leading to the former’s electoral marginalization. In 2019, the opposition adopted—at least rhetorically—a strategy of cooperation. In several key states, such as Uttar Pradesh (India’s biggest electoral prize with 80 parliamentary seats), longtime rivals joined forces not due to any common ideological commitment or adherence to a unified leadership, but rather as an existential impulse to prevent their marginalization.

In reality, these shifting dynamics did little to curb the BJP’s electoral juggernaut. The BJP, in 2019, earned 37.4 percent of the all-India vote and won 303 seats, the best results for any party since 1989 and 1984, respectively. The composition of the BJP’s support base also points to intriguing trends. Although the BJP’s seat tally from the Hindi belt dipped slightly—the eight states mentioned earlier still accounted for 66 percent of the BJP’s overall tally in 2019—the party suffered only modest attrition in terms of its seat share. In fact, in many states across the country, the BJP’s vote share actually rose to new levels. In thirteen states and union territories—stretching from Chandigarh to Karnataka—the BJP’s vote share surged past 50 percent.

But what is most interesting about the 2019 election results is how the BJP has made significant inroads into eastern India. Traditionally, the BJP has been seen as a party of Hindi-speaking northerners, a designation that puts it at odds with India’s eastern corridor, where politics revolves around subnational mobilization driven by powerful linguistic and cultural identities. For instance, in 2014, the BJP won just 3 seats in the states of West Bengal and Odisha; both states feature dominant regional parties with a formidable grassroots presence, the Trinamool Congress and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), respectively. In 2019, the BJP won 26 seats in these same states—cementing its position in both states as the principal opposition, ousting the Left (in Bengal) and the Congress Party (in Odisha). In this election, the BJP even opened its account in the southern state of Telangana by winning 4 seats—an outcome few election analysts had foretold.³²

Beyond geography, the BJP also increased its support from nearly all Hindu caste groups. From upper castes to OBCs to Dalits and tribals, the BJP’s vote share increased from its 2014 level—according to the 2019 National Election Study conducted by the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS).³³ Although the party has traditionally performed well in more urban areas, in 2019 (as in 2014) it dominated across settlement types. In fact, in 2019 the BJP made its biggest gains in rural areas. Similarly, the party increased its vote share across social classes, with the share of poor voters backing the BJP increasing the largest (from 24 to 36 percent in five years).

An additional sign of the BJP’s pan-Indian dominance is the fact that, in 2019, it contested more seats than the Congress Party for the first time in history. In 2019, the BJP fielded candidates in 436 parliamentary constituencies, compared to 421 for the Congress. This is a telling measure because it speaks to the reach of the party organization; both national parties are more likely to cede seats to coalition partners where they feel that they have a low probability of winning.

Out of those 436 constituencies where its candidates’ names featured on the ballot, the BJP finished as the winner or runner-up in 375 (see figure 4). The Congress managed to finish in the top two in just 261 races. This too represents a striking departure from the past. In 1984, the Congress was a top-two finisher in 510 constituencies, compared to the BJP’s 105. In three decades, the parties’ fortunes completely reversed: Congress was competitive in only half as many races as it had been in 1984, while the BJP was nearly four times as competitive.

Thanks largely to the BJP’s stellar performance, 2019 also saw the highest share of incumbents win reelection (see figure 5). In all, 67 percent of incumbent MPs who sought reelection won their races, the highest rate since 1984. To put this number in context, just 42 percent of incumbents won in the decisive 2014 general election and 50 percent emerged victorious in 2009.

Yet an exclusive focus on general election outcomes blinds observers to systemic changes occurring on other fronts. Although the BJP boasted a relatively limited presence at the state-level prior to the 2014 election, its fortunes greatly improved following the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. As of June 2019, the BJP holds chief ministerial positions in twelve states while its NDA allies control another six (see figure 6). While these numbers have come down after the BJP’s December 2018 losses in three state assembly elections, the growth in the BJP’s presence at the state level is remarkable. During the BJP’s previous stint in power under the late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP controlled at most six state governments. Conversely, the Congress Party today is at the helm of just five states—one-third of the party’s tally as recently as 2013. In fact, the BJP’s gains have largely come at the expense of the Congress, as the share of chief ministers headed by a regional party has remained roughly steady since 2006.

The BJP’s control of state governments has meant, not surprisingly, that its share of state legislators—or members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs)—has also experienced marked growth (see figure 7). Since the BJP’s inception, it had badly trailed both the Congress and regional parties in terms of its representation among MLAs. In 1980, for instance, just 4 percent of India’s MLAs belonged to the BJP compared with 51 percent for the Congress and 45 percent for a disparate set of regional parties. During Vajpayee’s tenure, the BJP finally crossed the 20 percent threshold and lagged behind a declining Congress share by just a few percentage points. Then, in 2014, the BJP, for the first time, surpassed the Congress and has never looked back. As of June 2019, the BJP boasts 32 percent of MLAs compared to 21 percent for the Congress and 47 percent for all other parties.

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