Editing Content :: Admin Scraper

Chapter

Content type

Position

Value

40   PoliticsinIndiasincIndependence the Congress. Since there was room within the party for various factions to fight with each other, it meant that leaders representing different interests and ideologies remained within the Congress rather than go out and form a new party. Most of the state units of the Congress were made up of numerous factions. The factions took different ideological positions making the Congress appear as a grand centrist party. The other parties primarily attempted to influence these factions and thereby indirectly influenced policy and decision making from the “margins”. They were far removed from the actual exercise of authority. They were not alternatives to the ruling party; instead they constantly pressurised and criticised, censured and influenced the Congress. The system of factions functioned as balancing mechanism within the ruling party. Political competition therefore took place within the I thought factions Congress. In that sense, in the first decade of electoral competition the Congress acted both as the ruling party as well as the opposition. were a disease that That is why this period of Indian politics has been described as the needed to be cured. You make it sound ‘Congress system’. as if factions are normal and good. Emergenceofoppositionparties r As we have noted above, it is not that India did k not have opposition parties during this period. a While discussing the results of the elections, S we have already come across the names of i r many parties other than the Congress. Even C then India had a larger number of diverse and vibrant opposition parties than many other multi-party democracies. Some of these had come into being even before the first general election of 1952. Some of these parties played an important part in the politics of the country in the ’sixties and ’seventies. The roots of almost all the non-Congress parties of today can be traced to one or the other of the opposition parties of the 1950s. All these opposition parties succeeded in gaining only a token representation in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies during this period. Yet their presence played a crucial role in maintaining the democratic character of the “Tug of War” (29 August 1954) is a cartoonist’s system. These parties offered a sustained and impression of the relative strength of the oppositioften principled criticism of the policies and and the government. Sitting on the tree are Nehru practices of the Congress party. This kept the and his cabinet colleagues. Trying to topple the tree are opposition leaders A. K. Gopalan, Acharya ruling party under check and often changed Kripalani, N.C. Chatterjee, Srikantan Nair and the balance of power within the Congress. By Sardar Hukum Singh. keeping democratic political alternative alive, Reprint 2026-27