The Rise of the Second Dominant Party System in India: BJP’s New Social Coalition in 2019

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Abstract

The social coalition that supported the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 mirrored the demographic profile of the Hindu society. The party made substantial gains among the lower castes, the poor, rural voters, and less educated. How did BJP manage to attract these new voters? We argue that the immediate context of 2019 elections along with a profound ideological shift in Indian politics lies at the heart of the BJP’s success. Underpinning the short-term factors of Modi’s popularity, BJP’s organizational advantage, heightened nationalistic sentiments, and expansive welfare politics, a new form of ethno-political majoritarianism delinked from religious Hindu nationalism was key to the party’s ability to attract new voters.

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The Congress 'System' in India

Rajni Kothari (1964)

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Ideology and Identity

Pradeep Chhibber, Rahul Verma (2018)

This book challenges the view that party politics and elections in India are far removed from ideas. It claims that a dominant intellectual paradigm of what constitutes an ideology is not entirely applicable to many multiethnic countries in the twentieth century. In these more diverse states, the most important ideological debates center on statism —the extent to which the state should dominate society, regulate social norms, and redistribute private property, and on recognition —whether and how the state should accommodate the needs of various marginalized groups and protect minority rights from assertive majoritarian tendencies. Using survey data from the Indian National Election Studies (NES) and survey experiments from smaller but more focused studies, and evidence drawn from the Constituent Assembly debates, it shows that Indian electoral politics, as represented by political parties, their members, and their voters, is in fact marked by deep ideological cleavages, with parties, party members, and voters taking distinct positions on statism and recognition. This ideological divide can account for the replacement of the one-party-dominant system by a party system in which regional parties have become far more important and a right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had spectacular success in the 2014 national elections. The focus on ideology also explains why leadership is so important in contemporary Indian politics as well as the limited influence of patronage politics. The book shows how education, the media, and religious practice transmit the competing ideas that lie at the heart of the ideological debates in India.