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Dominance and Dissent: Their inter‐relations in the Indian party system

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

W. H. Morris‐Jones
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Extract

With Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent in January of this year, India faced for the second time within eighteen months the problem of succession to leadership, The task may have been easier on the second occasion: for one thing, it was not a matter, as it had been in 1964, of finding a successor to a man revered for a full generation as a national leader; for another, there was to hand the experience of the first occasion. On the other hand, while Nehru's end had been for long foreseen and considered, and came as the culmination of a period of declining grip, that of La1 Bahadur occurred without warning. Moreover, for all the respect that Shastri had attracted, the atmosphere in which his replacement had to be sought was not that of the somewhat hushed apprehension in which he had been chosen. But while the second succession was thus accompanied by greater noise and bustle, and while the element of conflict and rivalry was now expressed in the taking of a vote to determine the issue, both operations went with every appearance of smoothness. India felt proud, and most of the world relieved, to find that there was a system that could take the strain. But what is that system ?

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , 01 July 1966 , pp. 451 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1966

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References

1 Tanzania may be an example. See the illuminating article by Tordoff, William, ‘The General Election in Tanzania’ in Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, IV, I (03 1966), pp. 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 A concise but fairly detailed account of the system is attempted in ‘Political Forces’ Chapter 5 of my Government and Politics of india, London, Hutchinson Uni‐ versity Library, 1964.

3 The first clear analysis of this third aspect came from R. Kothari in ‘Party System’, one of a series of articles on ‘Form and Substance in Indian Politics’ published in Economic Weekly (Bombay), XIII, 22 (3 June 1961), pp. 847–854. There he wrote

The role of opposition parties in India is quite distinctive. Instead of providing an alternative to the Congress party, they function by influencing sections within the Congress. They oppose by making Congressmen oppose. Groups within the ruling party assume the role of opposition parties, often quite openly, reflecting the ideologies and interests of the other parties. The latter influence political deusionmaking at the margin. Criticism from the platform or in the legislature has often found response among Congressmen and been echoed in the deliberations of the party. The political stature of an opposition leader and his personal relations with the high-ups in the Congress have often given him an influence with the Congress which has prevented frustration and bitterness which would otherwise result from his party being in a position of permanent minority.

See also his article ‘The Congress System’ in Asian Survey, IV, z (December 1964), pp. 1161-1173.

4 The outline is brilliantly given in his article, ‘Traditional role performance arid the development of modem political parties: the Indian case’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 26, No. 4 (November 1964), pp. 830–849, and the detail is spelt out in his forthcoming book, Party‐building in a New Nation: The Indian National Congress.

5 See Bailey, F. G., Politics and Social Change, London, Oxford University Press, 1964 which did so much to pioneer this field. Paul Brass, Factional Politics in Indian State, Berkeley and Los Angela, University of California Press, 1965, is a fine account of the linking of local factions to state Congress circles in Uttar Pradesh.Google Scholar

6 The arguments are indicated in my article ‘Parliament and the Dominant party’, Parliamentary Affairs, XVII, 3 (Summer x964), pp. 296–307.

7 A related paper, ‘Dilemmas of Dominance’, deals with these matters and will be published shortly.

8 This way of putting it may beg an important question: why did the leaders not feel the need to use the party to help to overcome some of the problems which they were struggling with as members of the government? The answer is probably that they—Patel, in particular—had more confidence in the civil service than in a party machine which had grown rusty during the enforced inactivity of the war years (after 1942) and which had been by‐passed during the frantic and tangled independence negotiations of 1946–47.

9 Much of the story comes to light through recent studies of present faction pat‐ terns. The latter have their origins in the tussles of the late forties and early fifties. The evidence is given in the work of Brass on Uttar Pradesh (op. cit.), the district studies by Weiner in several states (op. cit.) and a Rajasthan study by L. Schrader (Ph.D. thesis, 1965, University of California, Berkeley).

10 See my ‘Dilemmas of Dominance’ for the evidence.

11 Their role seems to have been less important in the second succession crisis than in the first when they emerged to considerable prominence.