At the start of 2024, it seemed as if a massive victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 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 (Permanent Black, 2024), presents ten 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 elsewhere. E. Sridharan, Academic Director and Chief Executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI), as well as a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar at CASI, has closely followed India’s political developments over the years, and most recently published a paper examining pre-electoral coalition politics in the 2024 general elections.
CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to E. Sridharan about the results of the 2024 general elections, the “beginnings of a loose bipolarity” between two big national blocks in India’s Parliament, and how the strategies used in pre-electoral coalitions make India rather unique and particularly different from the European nations that form the bulk of coalition literature in political science.
Rohan: Let’s start with this year's general election results and the coalition that emerged from that. How is it different from what we've seen in India over the last decade and then before that? How would you characterize the current coalition in government in India?
E. Sridharan: There are four types of coalitions in the literature, if you look at it comparatively around the world. One is what is called minimal winning coalitions, where there are only enough parties to get a majority, no surplus parties, which are not needed for a majority. Then there are what are called minority coalitions. Eight of the twelve coalitions in India since 1977 have been minority coalitions. That is where the coalition itself, the leading party and its coalition partners, are short of a majority and need external support.
The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, the BJP-led NDA (1998-2004) didn't have a majority in the Lok Sabha. Vajpayee had 182, and with its partners, it still fell short of 272. It needed outside support from the Telugu Desam Party. Now, the Telugu Desam Party was, at that time, in a sense, part of the NDA, but it was not part of the Council of Ministers. If you don't have ministers then you are considered part of the legislative coalition in parliament, not the executive coalition. And in the literature, that is still called a minority coalition. Vajpayee’s NDA was a minority coalition, so was UPA I, which depended on outside support from the Left Front, and UPA II, which depended on outside support from the Samajwadi Party and BSP.
We've had eight minority coalitions out of the twelve coalition governments. And we've had three of what I call oversized coalitions—that is the term used in the literature. Oversized coalitions are those where the leading party itself has a majority, but still keeps allied parties, typically pre-electoral allies, in the ministry. In 2014 and 2019, the BJP-led governments had simple majorities for the BJP, but they kept other parties in the ministry and gave them ministerships. Similarly, the Janata party in 1977, technically a single unified party, had a majority of 295 seats at that time. But they had the Akali Dal as an external partner, so technically it became an oversized coalition. In West Bengal for several terms, you had a Left Front government for 34 years in all. For most of that time, the CPM had a majority on its own in the assembly, but they kept the CPI, the RSP, and others as coalition partners in the ministry. Sometimes oversized coalitions are called a surplus majority coalition with the majority party.
2024 is different in the sense that you have a surplus majority coalition without a majority party. The leading party, BJP, had 240 seats, 32 short of a majority, but it has more coalition partners than is strictly needed for 272. It has an NDA going up to 293 out of 543 seats. To reach 272, you have 240 plus 16 from the TDP, 12 from JDU, and 7 of Shiv Sena.
With those three, you can get to 272, but you're keeping on additional parties in the ministry, so it's a surplus majority coalition where there are redundant partners. This is the first of its kind out of the twelve coalitions we've had in India since 1977.
Rohan: This is new in technical terms, but would you expect it to operate differently?
E. Sridharan: No. I would expect this to operate not too differently from the last two—2014, 2019—because although the BJP lacks a majority, it has a surplus majority coalition, so no party is pivotal. One party can't pull out and threaten it. There will have to be a lot of coordination among the allies to pull out and threaten the government. In a sense, what you might call the “redundant partners” in a surplus coalition are like an insurance policy.
If A pulls out, B can step in, or BCD, all these small ones and two guys can step it and get to 272. The allies are somewhat trapped. I also argue even in minority coalitions, there are lock-in effects or partial lock-in effects. For example, If the TDP had pulled out in 1999, they would have effectively strengthened the Congress in Andhra Pradesh at that time—which was the state-level principal opponent. Similarly, the Left and the BJP have sharp ideological differences. The Left, if they pulled down the UPA, would be helping the BJP, which is the main ideological opponent, more so than the Congress. When it came to the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2007, the Left said they would pull out support, but the Congress was able to get Samajwadi Party and BSP to support it, and it went through. Then in 2009, they won 206 seats, still short of 272—far short—but they got external support from SP and BSP and various other parties.
Minority coalitions in the Indian context can be stable, I've argued, because your state-level partner, whether it is Telugu Desam Party for the Vajpayee government, whether it is the Left front for UPA I, or whether it's Samajwadi and BSP, whose main opponents in their home state was the BJP, not the Congress, are to some extent locked in. They can't just walk out. Even minority coalitions in India have been stable because of what I call at least partial lock-in effects because of state-level repercussions.
Rohan: Do you see a lock-in being in place this time around as well?
E. Sridharan: To some extent, yes. Nitish Kumar is the chief minister of Bihar. His main opponent is the INDIA alliance in Bihar—that is RJD, Congress, and other parties. Why would he pull down the BJP, who is his coalition partner in Bihar also? He might lose his government there. He would be strengthening his local state-level opponents. So, to some extent there's a lock-in effect. He would've calculated all this when he walked out of the INDIA Alliance in February. The TDP’s main opponent is YSR Congress—Jagan Reddy—in Andhra Pradesh. Now, Jagan is not part of NDA. It's a three-cornered fight there, but even then, TDP gets a lot of benefits from being in the BJP’s alliance, which would be lost if it joined the INDIA Alliance. Right now, the TDP is getting benefits for his state, so why would he pull down the BJP government? The incentives are such that the allies are partially locked in, at least in Bihar, and many of the smaller parties elsewhere, such as in Maharashtra.
There is a partial lock-in effect, and there are redundant partners as an insurance policy in case anybody walks out. The BJP still has the upper hand in negotiations within the coalition, and therefore the BJP's ideological and policy approach has not changed.
Rohan: As an outside observer, it seems like the lock-in effects are slightly weaker in this case. The TDP is not necessarily going to be hurt by pulling away from the BJP in that sense because its opponent there is not necessarily the Congress. We have seen instances in the past where Nitish Kumar has worked with the Congress and the INDIA Alliance. It's not completely beyond the pale.
E. Sridharan: That is right. But they have got redundant partners going up to 293 for the legislative coalition, which is 21 more than 272.
Rohan: In its technical terms, you said it would broadly map out to how the last ten years went. Are there other things we ought to know about this kind of coalition from the literature elsewhere and how they operate?
E. Sridharan: A lot of things have been achieved despite governments not having a single party majority. A lot of economic reforms are difficult to sell to the public because you have a political cost-benefit structure where the political costs are upfront, you're going to hurt certain interest groups in the beginning, and the benefits come only with growth later. In theory, it should be difficult to do these without a strong single-party majority government, but they got done post '91 under many coalitions.
A lot of things are doable even under coalitions. That's the international experience also. Typically, coalitions find it difficult to cap spending because every section of the coalition, every party, wants its cut. They want the allocations for their pet themes, pet projects, or in a federal system for their states. Right now, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar are getting significant amounts of money. They may not get special status, but they're getting funds.
The literature shows that what is difficult for coalitions, at least in the Western literature, is that cutting spending and containing deficits—that becomes difficult.
Rohan: Does this election explain to some extent why the BJP kept redundant partners in its previous two terms? You've pointed out throughout that one broadly European theory is that coalitions would just keep the minimal number of parties necessary so that they don't have to share power further, but this is not what we have seen in India. You have argued that there are good reasons for them to keep these “redundant partners.”
E. Sridharan: Yes. This brings us to the importance of pre-electoral alliances and pre-electoral coalitions. The BJP's majority in 2014 was 282, 10 more than 272—in that 282, there were 57 MPs who were elected from states where coalitions were important for the BJP. I'm not talking about one or two seats. I'm talking about places like Maharashtra, where the Shiv Sena was quite an important coalition partner. They were not so unequal that BJP was operating on its own and gave a couple of seats to a small partner. 57 seats came from the states where coalitions were significant.
Now, in 2019, despite the BJP increasing its majority to 303, 42 seats came from Maharashtra, Bihar, and Punjab where the BJP had significant coalition partnerships. I'm not saying that they would've lost all 42 if they went alone. They would have won some, but they would have maybe gotten much less than 303, maybe closer to 272. Pre-electoral coalitions have been vital in creating these majorities in 2014 and 2019.
Rohan: It's quite significant that the two key allies here, TDP and JDU, were sewn up as allies just in the months ahead of the elections. Is this not a feature that's seen in coalitional politics elsewhere? A lot of your work draws out India as quite a different example of coalitional politics compared to the standard literature, particularly from Western Europe, and I want to get a sense of where pre-election coalitions fit in that.
E. Sridharan: I have argued that one unusual feature of India is very large coalitions. You have six to twelve parties in the ministry, plus you have additional parties that may be opting to support from outside. They are very large coalitions, and that is a function of a federal system with a large number of regional parties, sub-regional parties, state parties, or sub-state parties—because you have this sort of fragmented party system, which emerged from a Congress-hegemonic system.
In the first three elections, you had a Congress-hegemonic system. From 1967 to 1989, you had the emergence of viable challengers, but different challengers state by state to the Congress, so that by 1989, Congress had that old hegemonic structure in only seven states. After that came the bipolarization, as I've called it, of the state-level party system between Congress and a viable challenger. Now, in 1967 to 1989, you had three types of bipolarities emerging where the opposition state by state consolidated behind a principal challenger party making it viable. You had Congress versus Jana Sangh/BJP in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and you had Congress versus Left in West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura, and you had Congress versus a regional party, each of them different in Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Goa.
1984 was an exceptional election because of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Coalition politics might have started earlier had it not been an exceptional election. But after that, you had a broad pre-electoral alliance defeating the Congress in 1989. Then after that we saw many pre-electoral alliances in the coalition phase 1989 to 2014, when no single party got a majority in the Lok Sabha. That's what I call the phase of coalition and/or minority government.
I'm saying and/or because coalition governments have also been minority coalitions. There are two single-party minority governments, Congress 1991-96, and for less than a year you had Chandra Shekhar’s Janata Dal faction supported by Congress from the outside. You had a variety of coalition-type arrangements. You had essentially mostly minority coalitions and two single-party minority governments, and then after that, you had two oversized coalitions in 2014 and 2019.
This is different from the others. The rest of the world doesn't have such a multi-party system. We have 30, 40 parties represented in the Lok Sabha, many of them with just one or two seats. It's because of the fragmentation of the party system gradually starting from '67, but accelerated after '89, that you need large coalitions and large pre-election alliances.
Rohan: One of the things you've argued is that some of these conditions have been quite cleverly utilized by parties. You point out that the BJP used its coalitional approaches to rise over the years, first becoming a vital third party and then using its alliances to grow. How have you seen the BJP's approach to coalitions, both at the national and state level, change over the last 10 years, and are regional parties now more wary?
E. Sridharan: You have to look at the incentives under the first-past-the-post system at the state level. In a federal first-past-the-post system like India, if you have two principal parties, and you have a third party, the number three party becomes an attractive pre-election partner to aggregate vote to either of the first two, unless there is some serious ideological difference. If you're in a third-party status like the Congress in Tamil Nadu, which has allied with both DMK and AIADMK, both of them find an additional vote bank to aggregate votes. Similarly, the BJP became attractive to the Akali Dal which would accommodate them versus the Congress in Punjab and so on.
The third party in this kind of party system becomes an attractive coalition ally barring a situation where there are serious ideological differences. Even in that case, you may find an alliance. I'll give an example: in the late sixties, there was an Akali-Jana Sangh-CPI government in Punjab for a short time, bringing together the Right and the Left. You will find today, the CPM and other Left parties are part of the INDIA Alliance, but not in Kerala where the fight is the Congress versus Left.
The BJP used that logic from 1989 to 2004, which allowed it to expand its state level base in many places like Gujarat, like Rajasthan, to eat into the base of the allied party and go from being the third party to one of the two leading parties, and in some states, become the first party to displace the Congress.
Rohan: Given how they’ve subsequently operated, have regional parties changed tactics? We’ve seen the Shiv Sena split up, the JDU has been wary of seeing its space go away, the BJD in Odisha…
E. Sridharan: You still find alliance hopping happening. The regional parties seem to be very flexible in terms of who they ally with. The only kind of alliance we don't find is Left and the BJP, although in 1989, the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal, which won and formed the government, was supported externally by both the BJP on one side and the Left on the other because Congress was the overwhelming powerful opponent. The first-past-the-post system with its emphasis on vote aggregation forces you to pool votes by making alliances, and that logic overwhelms or overpowers ideological and policy differences. Therefore, you have these very disparate, large number of parties in alliances.
Rohan: There's been a sense that the Modi era has been more polarizing than others. I think to my mind, it would be harder to see the DMK easily switch over today to a BJP alliance. I'm just wondering from your purchase as an academic studying this, has it been the case that the last ten years have been more polarizing at the coalitional level outside of the BJP and Congress?
E. Sridharan: No. The BJP has been and is an ideological party. They didn't have the numbers in 1999-2004. They put the three issues of Article 370, Ram Temple and UCC on the back burner. That was because they didn't have the numbers, and Shakti Sinha has said so in his book. He was the key aide to Vajpayee. When they had the numbers in 2014 and onwards, they started to push the ideological agenda. They had their way with the Supreme Court's approval on the Ram Temple and they've had their way on Article 370, both of which have been approved retrospectively by the courts. They have been an ideological party pushing an ideology.
This goes back to the whole motivation for forming a government. Is it purely about the fruits of office? That's what William Riker, one of the founding coalition theorists, assumed—office-seeking assumptions, not policy-seeking assumptions or ideological assumptions. If you make office-seeking assumptions, the logic is a minimal winning coalition because you don't want to share power. Since power is the main thing, you don't want to share power with the additional redundant parties. But if you take a policy-seeking motivation, politics is about not just holding office. Then it makes sense to reach out and form broader alliances to enable legislation by aggregating numbers in parliament. The BJP has always been an ideological party, and the motivations are really ideological, not just the fruits of office. Of course, that happens too, that's there all the time. People want material benefits, but apart from that, ideology is a significant factor and we've seen it pushed in the last ten years significantly on various issues, and it's going on. In the last six months, I've not seen any change in the approach of pushing back ideological issues.
Rohan: Another of the papers in the book tackled the question of the Congress as an umbrella party earlier. Also, you've written in the past about where you imagined the Congress going after 2014, after 2019. I'm curious to get your reading of what has happened with the Congress in this election and with the India Alliance broadly. Many people have long expected that India's electoral politics will turn into a bipolarity, and you have argued that there are bipolarities, but at the state level and not at the national level. Are we seeing something different here with two very strong and rather big coalitional blocks in parliament?
E. Sridharan: What we are seeing is very early days yet. But nationally, you seem to be getting a broad center-right alliance centered on the BJP, which is, at the moment, strongly ideological and what I have called the “coalition of the disadvantaged,” with the Congress shifting leftwards compared to its traditional stand.
When the Mandal movement happened in 1990, Congress was basically not in favor of OBC reservation. Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, when he was told about the Mandal report, said, "I'm not going to touch this. This is a can of worms." Then reservations were granted under V. P. Singh, and there was a big reaction from upper castes around the country, especially North India. Now, today the Congress seems to be moving toward increasing caste-based reservations. That's why I'm calling it broadly “coalition of the disadvantaged,” and the BJP center-right coalition. That also can be misleading. The BJP's vote share in the last three elections has remained quite high among deprived sections like Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, where they have more votes than the Congress and also the poor across all categories. They have also become an umbrella party. From the original limited base they had of basically upper caste urban North India and Central India, they expanded geographically and socially—geographically horizontally and socially vertically—into the disadvantaged sections also. They become an umbrella party in a sense, but without the key minorities, without Muslims and Christians, except maybe in Kerala, you find that some Christians have made some kind of deal with BJP.
Rohan: India has never really seen a back and forth between two large groups, whether parties or coalitions. Could you imagine the conditions now being more fertile for that, or is it just too early to tell?
E. Sridharan: It's too early to tell, but there are beginnings of some kind of a very loose bipolarity at the national level between two very broad and loose coalitions, where they can be partner-hopping. Alliance-hopping has happened before and can happen. Two things seem to be happening. There seems to be a consolidation behind the INDIA block and behind the BJP in the sense that, in the attitudinal surveys associated with elections, we find that there is a sort of growing support for the BJP ideology, although it is only a fraction. My estimate is about half of the BJP vote share is hardcore ideological. Similarly, on the INDIA side also, you find some kind of loose left-of-center or coalition of the disadvantaged kind of ideology and/or regional consolidation. You find a very, very diffuse and still in-process consolidation happening on both sides. It's the beginning; it's too early to say.
Rohan: We spoke after the national elections about a loose bipolarity at the national level, and you've also argued in a recent paper that just came out in EPW that there's some sense of this being stronger at the national level and maybe fragile at the state level. As we end 2024, given that we had surprising results in Haryana and Maharashtra, does that still hold? And is it new?
E. Sridharan: Well, we have had it before. After the Vajpayee governments, 1998-99 and 1999 to 2004, the Congress accepted coalition politics and formed the UPA alliance, which won in 2004 with a narrow margin. So, from 2004-2014, there was the UPA versus the NDA. It was bipolar with a lot of parties either jumping sides at various times or being independent, not part of either alliance. You had two loose coalitions at that time with a broad middle space. Now you have two loose coalitions without such a broad middle space. The parties that are not part of either INDIA or NDA have shrunk to relatively few. So, you do have a broad two-coalition structure in which the INDIA coalition is much more tentative, more fragile. It is nationally a coalition, but in many states they are fighting separately.
What I have written in this EPW article is that this 2024 general election was a patchwork quilt. Of the BJP’s net 63 seats lost in the Lok Sabha, they lost a lot of seats in the three largest states: UP, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.
That the INDIA alliance would do well and the BJP would lose seats in a major way was not anticipated at that time, in UP and also Maharashtra. And in West Bengal where, despite the TMC and the Congress not being aligned, the Congress left a lot of seats for TMC. So, the bulk of the BJP and NDA loss can be explained by what happened with three big states.
But the BJP also lost seats in Rajasthan, they lost some seats, but not that many. They still won the majority of seats in Karnataka, and they won and made gains in Telangana, and they swept Odisha. And they consolidated their hold by gaining a little bit elsewhere. And so, it was a patchwork quilt kind of effect where the net loss is explained by these three largest states in the Lok Sabha.
Rohan: The NDA clearly had a big turnaround in Maharashtra relative to Lok Sabha results. But it is not a consequence of any change in its coalitional strategy.
E. Sridharan: Yes, the partners are the same. The BJP contested the single largest number of seats compared to its partners, but less than half. So, they knew that even if they sweep, they will still fall short of a majority on their own. So, they were mentally prepared for a coalition.
Rohan: Despite the loss at the Lok Sabha level and then other elections that have happened since, which showed that the BJP is stronger than some people might have attributed after the Lok Sabha, the change in strategy doesn't come from picking different allies—including in Haryana and so on.
E. Sridharan: No. The BJP strategy remains state-by-state coalitions. It has been there for the last 25 years since NDA was formed. I have a paper which I wrote almost two decades ago in 2005, about how the BJP, from 1989-2004, grew horizontally based on alliances in which they gradually ate into the base of the allies.
I found this to be the case election by election from 1999 to 2004, when they grew significantly and spread horizontally based on skillful coalition building, but also into eating into the base of many of their partners. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, there are strong incentives to form pre-electoral coalitions because winning depends on getting a plurality. So, there's an incentive to put aside differences for the election and ally to pool votes.
Rohan: What should we be keeping an eye out for from a coalition, political economy and strategy standpoint as we look ahead to 2025?
E. Sridharan: The Congress base has shrunk. It got only about 21.5 percent of the vote in the Lok Sabha, going up from 19.5 percent last time, about a 2 percent gain. But on that 2 percent gain, it made spectacular gains, from 52 to 99 seats. Now, most of those seat gains were in places where they were a potentially junior partner. It was not in head-to-head contests with the BJP. In those, the Congress didn't do well. Their net seat gain came heavily from the places where the INDIA Alliance worked. So, they are still dependent on alliance partners.
Now, Congress is typically coalitional when it is the dominant party and it needs an additional partner to get over that halfway mark in the state—then it goes to the third party, fourth party, and so on. Or if it's in a junior position, where it is third or worse, then it becomes attractive, coalitionally, as a partner to the first party. Like in Tamil Nadu, Congress has historically allied as the third party.
When it is the third party, it becomes coalitionable. But in places where it was once dominant, if a third party is challenging the Congress—like in Punjab—then there's no alliance. So, you might have some states like Punjab or West Bengal where there is no effective alliance on the INDIA side.
And right now, with Delhi elections in February, Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal is saying, "I'm not going to go with Congress." So, the INDIA alliance is actually more fragile than NDA, in the sense that there are a lot of powerful regional parties that don't want to give up their space. And some of them want to expand to other states and run candidates in other states. SP ran some candidates elsewhere, so did AAP in Punjab, Gujarat, Haryana. And TMC is also thinking of making in-roads into some places. So, on the INDIA side, there are fragilities to observe.
Rohan: One thing that really struck me reading some of the papers was how there seemed to be quite a bit of conversation about the very structure of Indian politics, like proportional representation. The two big questions today on that front seem to be about delimitation and simultaneous elections, but I want your take on questions about structural electoral reform. What do you make of the question of representation and electoral system reform as of now? What are the issues on the table?
E. Sridharan: Well, proportional representation has never been on the table. The first chapter of the book is about the Constituent Assembly debates, about how the Constituent Assembly debated alternative electoral system. They didn't really debate it thoroughly. Now, PR in principle can help small parties and minorities attain seat share which is closer to their vote share. They can vote for their own parties, and subject to certain floor levels, they get a seat share closer to the population share in that sense. But it cannot always help them. I gave the example of Israel and Sri Lanka, where you have a proportional representation system. What is crucial is these two societies are much more polarized than India, despite having PR. I made this point a couple of times in written things and in interviews, that these two societies, despite having PR systems, are more acutely polarized between majority and minority than India until now, despite having a high degree of PR.
This is because what is actually vital is the way the constitution conceives implicitly or explicitly what is the nation and what are rights, and also the dominant narrative of what is the nation and who is part of it and who is not. In that sense, if there is a polarizing notion or exclusionary notion or exclusivist notion of who is the nation, what is the national culture, even if you get your proportion in the legislature, you'll still be marginalized. You will not get your share in the executive. The minority, the Arabs in Israel and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, are still marginalized.
Rohan: Finally, what misconceptions about Indian politics do you find yourself or Indian coalition politics and so on, what things do you find scholars or lay persons or media people getting wrong all the time? Are there things that you find yourself having to correct constantly?
E. Sridharan: There's a general sense that coalitions are unstable, but in India, you've had stable coalitions, stable minority governments. You had four minority governments, which have had full five-year terms, and continued to promote gradual reform and growth. You've not had the kind of instability that the literature would expect from very large multi-party coalitions. Coalition politics does not have to be unstable, does not have to be incompetent.
Eswaran Sridharan is the Academic Director and Chief Executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI).
Rohan Venkat is a CASI Managing Editor for India in Transition.
India in Transition (IiT) is published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) of the University of Pennsylvania. All viewpoints, positions, and conclusions expressed in IiT are solely those of the author(s) and not specifically those of CASI.
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