Interview: India’s unique coalition politics is a result of first-past-the-post election system

At the start of 2024, it seemed as if a massive victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Indian General Elections was a given. When the BJP turned in a middling performance, falling below the halfway majority mark in the Lok Sabha, it meant that – for the first time under Prime Minister Narendra Modi – the party would actually be reliant on coalition partners to remain in power, while also facing a much more powerful opposition block in Parliament.

The narrative emerging out of that result made it seem as if the Congress-led INDIA grouping was ascendant. Yet, just a few months later, state assembly elections – particularly in Haryana and Maharashtra – again flipped the script, with the BJP and its allies coming out on top. Still, each of those verdicts confirmed one thing: understanding coalition strategies remains vital to the study of politics in India.

Eswaran Sridharan’s book, Elections, Parties, and Coalitions in India: Theory and Recent History (Orient Blackswan, 2024), presents 10 papers examining India’s history with coalition politics, how different parties – particularly the BJP and the Congress – have used and been affected by coalitional strategies, and where India’s party system sits in comparison to democracies…

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