¹ The analysis here has been influenced by La Palombara, Joseph and Werner, Myron (eds.), Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 407–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² The successions have been amply documented by Brecher, Michael in Nehru's Mantle: The Politics of Succession in India (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966)Google Scholar and in “Succession in India 1967: The Routinization of Political Change,” Asian Survey, 7 (July, 1967), 423–443CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ A transfer of power at the state level took place as early as 1957 in Kerala. However, Kerala has always been considered an exceptional state and its politics have been considered an aberration in a general pattern of Congress dominance. The change in 1967 is far more massive and is widely believed in India to presage the defeat of the Congress at the center. When and if this occurs, Indian democracy will enter its third test, that of transfer of power at the center.

⁴ Kothari, Rajni, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” Asian Survey, 4 (December, 1964), 1161–1173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Morris-Jones' views on the one-party dominant system are presented most systematically in his “Dominance and Dissent: Their Inter-relations in the Indian Party System,” Government and Opposition 1 (08, 1966), 451–466CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his Government and Politics of India (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. V, and “Parliament and the Dominant Party,” Parliamentary Affairs, 17 (Summer, 1964), 296–307Google Scholar.

⁶ See Brass, Paul R., Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

⁷ Indian Nation, March 5 and 7, 1967.

⁸ On the origin and development of Congress groups in Uttar Pradesh, see Brass, op. cit., ch. III, and Bruce Graham, “The Succession of Factional Systems in the Uttar Pradesh Congress, 1937–1967,” (unpublished paper). For Bihar and Punjab, see Roy, Ramashray, “Intra-Party Conflict in the Bihar Congress,” Asian Survey, 6 (December, 1966), 706–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wallace, Paul, “The Political Party System of Punjab State (India): A Study of Factionalism,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁹ Giovanni Sartori, “European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism,” in La Palombara and Weiner, op. cit., ch. V. Sartori's model is derived from the party systems of contemporary Italy, the French Fourth Republic, and Weimar Germany. These systems are characterized by a “lack of basic consensus in which the distribution of opinion covers the maximum conceivable distance” (polarization), multiple lines of cleavage (multipolarity), and “growing radicalization” (centrifugal tendencies); see pp. 138–139. Sartori is not always clear and consistent in his definitions, but the model is far more useful than the conventional descriptions of European multiparty systems and is especially useful for purposes of comparison of and distinction among multiparty systems, which may vary considerably from one political system to another.

¹⁰ From 1952 to 1967, the Congress share of the popular vote has declined from 41.47% to 33.1% in Bihar, while the combined Communist vote has gone from 1.1% to 8.2% and the Jan Sangh has increased from 1.2% to 10.4%. In Uttar Pradesh, Congress has declined from 47.9% to 32.2% while the Communist vote has gone from .9% to 4.5% and that of the Jan Sangh from 6.4% to 21.7%. In Punjab, Congress secured 34.8% of the vote in 1952, rose to a high of 47.5% in 1957, and declined to 36.6% in the reorganized Punjab. The Communist vote has been transmuted since 1952 in the Punjab from 5.3% to 8.5% while that of Jan Sangh has gone from 5.0% to 9.8%. Figures from India, Election Commission, Report on the First General Elections in India, 1951–52 and Report on the Fourth General Elections in India, 1967.

¹¹ For example, an SSP minister commented upon the delay in the PSP's decision to join the non-Congress government in Bihar and their ultimate decision to do so in this way: “They [the PSP leaders] thought they would be nowhere if they went against the wishes of the people, who wanted non-Congress governments.” A Jan Sangh minister in Bihar, asked how long he thought the non-Congress government would last, gave a reply which indicated a similar attitude towards public opinion: “I think it will last because we all are afraid of this public opinion…No party will dare to take the blame of deserting this government.” A Jan Sangh minister in Punjab, asked why a non-Congress government had been formed instead of a coalition with the Congress, replied: “Everybody was opposed to Congress. The general swing is not with the Congress. If we go with the Congress, we are also doomed.” Citations from interview documents BG 29: 13; BG 35: 27; PG 17: 3.

¹² Interview document BG 32: 5.

¹³ Interview document UPII 30: 1.

¹⁴ Interview document UPII 30: 8.

¹⁵ Interview document BG 35: 25.

¹⁶ Interview document PG 6: 50.

¹⁷ Under the reorganization, the old Punjab state was divided into four segments. A new Hindi-speaking, predominantly Hindu state of Hariana was created; the capital city of Chandigarh was made into a union territory; the hill areas of the old state were transferred to Himachal Pradesh; and, the remaining Punjabi-speaking, predominantly Sikh areas became the residual state of Punjab.

¹⁸ Interview document BG 33: 10.

¹⁹ Except where otherwise cited, the information in this section has been derived from the Statesman, the Searchlight, the National Herald, and the Tribune (Ambala).

²⁰ Indian Nation, March 12, 1967.

²¹ Interview document BG 31: 11.

²² Indian Nation, March 20, 1967.

²³ “Charan Singh's Shrewd Politics,” Economic and Political Weekly, 3 (January 20, 1968), 183–184Google Scholar.

²⁴ For the contrary view that “the dominant party system is … only modified by fresh forms of competition, not replaced,” see Morris-Jones, W. H., “From Monopoly to Competition in India's Politics,” Asian Review, I 1 (November, 1967), 1–12Google Scholar.

²⁵ Sartori distinguishes between a “structured party system” in which “at least one or two of the existing parties have acquired … a national platform, a unified symbol, and some stable organization also at the local level, so that they are perceived by the country at large as the natural foci and channels of the political system” and a system in which there is “party atomization,” that is, “a highly fragmented pattern in which parties are mostly a facade covering loose and shifting coalitions of notables. In this stage the party system is still evanescent qua system: parties have no real platform, hardly a national spread, no centralized or coordinated organization, and even less anything resembling a stable organization.” Sartori, op. cit., pp. 167–168. What makes Indian party systems so interesting from a developmental point of view is that there are both structuring and tendencies toward atomization. My argument is that party development in India requires the consolidation of the predominance of the parties and the elimination of atomizing tendencies or at least the control of such tendencies so that they do not prevent the creation of conditions for stable and effective government.