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Parties and political change in South Asia
James Chiriyankandath
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK
Over the past seven decades and more political parties have become an essential feature of the political landscape of the South Asian subcontinent, serving both as a conduit and product of the tumultuous change the region has experienced. Yet they have not been the focus of sustained scholarly attention. This collection focuses on different aspects of how major parties have been agents of – and subject to – change in three South Asian states (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), examining some of the apparent paradoxes of politics in the subcontinent. Recurring themes are the importance of charismatic leaders and their families (and the corresponding neglect of institutionalisation) and the lack of pluralism in intraparty affairs, factors that render parties and political systems vulnerable to degeneration.
In the seven decades since South Asia emerged from two centuries of British colonial rule the subcontinent has witnessed considerable and often tumultuous, political change – military coups and popular uprisings, terrorism, rebellions, secessionist movements, civil wars, and the internal reorganisation or breakup of states. During this time political parties across the region have served both as a conduit and a product of these changes. Indian parties attracted significant attention from, especially American, political scientists in the 1960s and 1970s (Baxter, 1969; Erdman, 1967; Kochanek, 1968; Sisson, 1972; Weiner, 1967).1 In subsequent years the character and role of political parties in South Asia, did not receive the same degree of scholarly interest except for the rise of parties based on religious, ethnic or caste identity (Chandra, 2004; Graham, 1990; Katzenstein, 1979; Malik & Singh, 1994; Nasr, 1994; Subramanian, 1999). As coalition and minority governments became the norm at the national level in India after 1989 (Chiriyankandath, 1997), the changing party system also became more a focus of study (Chhibber, 1999; Mehra, 2013; Wyatt, 2010). In the last decade there has been a revival of interest in parties as for the first time there are governments elected on the basis of, at least nominally, competitive multiparty political systems in all the seven states of the subcontinent (DeSouza & Sridharan, 2006; Enskat, Mitra, & Spiess, 2004; Hasan, 2002; Suri, Hällhag, Kadirgamar-Rajasingham, Tjernström, & Gomez, 2007). Much still remains to be done in exploring the place of parties in South Asia – apart from Nasr’s (1994) work on the Jama’at-i Islami in Pakistan no substantial study of any subcontinental party outside India has yet appeared.
A large number and bewildering variety of parties are found across the region: in 2013 the Election Commission of India recognised 1443, including six recognised as national and 37 as state parties;2 the Election Commission of Pakistan listed 254;3 the Department of Elections in Sri Lanka lists 64;4 the Bangladesh Election Commission lists 40;5 139 parties registered in the run up to the November 2013 Constituent Assembly polls in Nepal;6 and even in tiny Bhutan and the Maldives, where political parties were only legalised in the past decade, there were five contesting the 2013 legislative election in Bhutan and eleven the 2009 poll in the Maldives.7 Although less than a hundred of the nearly two thousand parties are represented in national legislatures, the proliferation of parties has contributed to making government by coalition more common, especially in India, where the number of parties in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) increased from a mere 12 in 1957 to 37 in 2009.
South Asian parties include several of the oldest in the post-colonial world, foremost among them the 129-year-old Indian National Congress that led India to independence in 1947. Despite numerous splits and breakaways, most notably in 1969 and 1978, it has ruled the country for all but 13 of the past 67 years (albeit at the head of a coalition for the last 10). Congress’s chief rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, though founded in 1980, traces its organisational roots to the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organisation) established in 1925 and the Hindu Mahasabha formed in 1913. In Pakistan the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif), though only formed in 1988, in its nomenclature and rendition of history claims the heritage of the All India Muslim League that was founded in 1906 and brought the country into being.8 Its main opponent, the Pakistan People’s Party, was launched by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1967 and led by the Bhutto family from its foundation. Both the main parties in Sri Lanka, the opposition United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (the main component in the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance), were formed by leading figures in the erstwhile Ceylon National Congress within three years either side of the independence of the island in 1948. The contributors to this collection focus on different aspects of how these major parties have been agents and subjects of change.
The contributors use the prism of party politics to examine some of the apparent paradoxes of politics in South Asia. Shandana Mohmand’s contribution interprets the behaviour of voters, local leaders and candidates through a longitudinal study of the politics of a village in Pakistani Punjab from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, affording a unique insight into how the changing political dynamics in a rural locality linked to party competition at the national level. Some aspects of the story she tells – of politically influential families and women endowed with political clout by virtue of their family backround – represent recurring themes in discussions of subcontinental political parties.
Leading families are a ubiquitous feature of many major parties in South Asia, including several of those studied in this collection. C. Manikandan and Andrew Wyatt’s detailed analysis of the changing nature of leadership in one of India’s oldest regional parties (fd. 1949), the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, shows the important role played by the sons, daughter and other relatives of the octogenerian Muthuvel Karunanidhi, the veteran party leader and former chief minister. Pritam Singh’s complementary survey of how the politics of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the oldest Indian regional party (fd. 1920), have changed mentions in a footnote the father and son who serve as the Akali Dal chief minister and deputy chief minister of Indian Punjab, Parkash Singh Badal, another octogenerian party leader, and Sukhbir Singh Badal (several of their relatives are also, or have previously, served as ministers and legislators).
The salience of family and kinship in the leadership of South Asian political parties is inescapable – the writer Patrick French even forsees the Indian Lok Sabha perhaps turning into a ‘Vansh Sabha’ (house of dynasties) (French, 2011, pp. 105–123). There have been two or more leaders of national political parties (and heads of government) from one or two families in India (the Nehru-Gandhis), Pakistan (the Bhuttos), Sri Lanka (the Senanayakes and Bandaranaikes), Bangladesh (Mujibur Rahman and his daughter Hasina Wazed, Ziaur Rahman and his widow Khaleda Zia), and Nepal (the Koiralas). A consequence has been that the region, despite returning some of the lowest numbers of women to legislatures, has had the largest number of female heads of government and leaders of governing parties – seven since 1960. Yet, as Carole Spary shows in her analysis of the nomination of women candidates in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Indian political parties remain disinclined to risk nominating women except in constituencies where personal strengths and family connections favour particular female candidates.
The process by which political parties nominate candidates is one that has not received much attention in South Asian election studies but here Spary’s contribution is accompanied by another by Adnan Farooqui and E. Sridharan investigating how five Indian political parties chose their candidates in the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Its main finding, that parties are highly centralised in picking candidates does not come as a surprise, given the central role played by charismatic leaders, the neglect of institutionalisation and, often, a lack of pluralism within party forums. Farooqui and Sridharan refer to how the Bahujan Samaj Party expected candidates to ‘buy’ their nomination by making large financial contributions. Criminality, corruption and wealth form an important element in political selection in India, something highlighted by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) which found in 2009 that while 15 per cent of candidates to the Lok Sabha had criminal charges pending, twice the percentage – 30 per cent – of those elected did so (ADR, n.d., pp. 21–22). Similarly, although only 16 per cent of the candidates were ‘crorepatis’ (i.e. people with declared assets of over a crore or ten million rupees) this included 58 per cent of those returned with a third of MPs declaring assets worth over 50 million rupees (ADR, n.d., pp. 22; Gowda & Sridharan, 2012, p. 236).
The last two contributions to the issue, by Neil DeVotta and Harshan Kumarasingham, complement each other in tracing the descent of post-colonial Ceylon from ‘a model dominion’, the phrase used by the historian of the Commonwealth Nicholas Mansergh and quoted by Kumarasingham, to an authoritarian polity in which, as DeVotta says, ‘one family [that of President Mahinda Rajapaksa] dictates all politics’. Rendered especially vulnerable by its path to independence being mediated by a rarefied Anglophile political class, Sri Lanka’s two main political parties subsequently vitiated its democracy through competing in espousing Sinhala ethnic chauvinism and helping push the beleaguered Tamil minority to violent seperatism.
If the experience of South Asia’s southernmost state was an illustration of how parties can become agents of political degeneration, the preceding contributions in this collection show how they can serve as channels of political change, that, while sometimes negative, is potentially also constructive: in linking local to national politics (Mohmand), providing a focus for regional aspirations and ethnic and religious identity within a federal polity (Manikandan and Wyatt, and Singh), and widening the scope of democratic representation (Farooqui and Sridharan, and Spary). Over the past six and a half decades parties have become an essential feature of the South Asian political landscape. How they develop will help determine the ways in which that landscape changes in the years to come.
Acknowledgements
The editor would like to thank the reviewers of this collection, as well as the participants in the p...
