Political Science · Ch 15 — Recent Developments in Indian Politics
In this chapter…
In this chapter…
This closing chapter steps back for a wide-angle view of Indian politics across the last two decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. It's a stretch of history that resists easy summary — a tangle of different forces combined to produce outcomes nobody had really anticipated, and the shape of politics that emerged from it was hard to predict at the time and isn't much easier to make sense of in hindsight. Because the period involved genuinely contested, high-stakes disputes, and because it lies so close to the present, definitive judgments are still hard to reach. Even so, there are some central questions worth asking about the political shifts of this era.
The chapter frames its discussion around four such questions:
- What does the emergence of coalition politics mean for how Indian democracy functions?
- What is meant by 'Mandalisation', and how has it reshaped who gets political representation?
- What legacy has the Ram Janmabhoomi movement left behind?
- How has a newly emerging policy consensus narrowed or reshaped the choices available to politics?
Rather than answer these questions outright, the chapter's goal is more limited: to equip you with the background and analytical tools to work through them on your own by the time you finish the book. Political sensitivity is not treated as a reason to look away — understanding this recent history is precisely what makes sense of where Indian politics stands today.
The turbulence of party fortunes through the 1990s is captured well by a cartoon from 1990, which pictures several of the era's leading figures — Rajiv Gandhi, V. P. Singh, L. K. Advani, Chandrashekhar, Jyoti Basu, N. T. Rama Rao, Devi Lal, P. K. Mahanta, and K. Karunanidhi — riding out a roller-coaster together, a fitting image for a decade defined by sudden rises, equally sudden falls, and sharp changes of direction.
The cartoon, drawn in 1990, uses the metaphor of a roller coaster to capture the dizzying instability of Indian politics in that decade. The ride itself is the central object — a classic amusement-park roller coaster track with steep climbs, sharp drops, and loop-the-loops. There are no panels or separate frames; the entire scene is a single, continuous track winding across the page.
Seated in the cars of this roller coaster are nine prominent political leaders of the time: Rajiv Gandhi, V. P. Singh, L. K. Advani, Chandrashekhar, Jyoti Basu, N. T. Rama Rao, Devi Lal, P. K. Mahanta, and K. Karunanidhi. Each leader is shown gripping the safety bar or holding on for dear life as the car they are in lurches upward or plunges downward. The track’s shape suggests that no leader stays at the top for long — one moment a party is soaring (in power or popularity), the next it is crashing. The cartoon does not label specific events or dates on the track; the ups and downs are generic, representing the rapid rise and fall of governments, alliances, and electoral fortunes that characterised the 1990s.
What the cartoon teaches is that the 1990s were a period of unprecedented political volatility. Before this decade, Indian politics was dominated by a single party (Congress) and a relatively stable party system. The roller coaster image conveys that, after 1989, no single party could hold power for a full term, coalitions formed and collapsed quickly, and leaders who were at the peak of influence could be out of office within months. The nine leaders shown represent the major political forces of the era — Congress (Rajiv Gandhi), Janata Dal (V. P. Singh, Chandrashekhar, Devi Lal), BJP (L. K. Advani), Left (Jyoti Basu), and regional parties (N. T. Rama Rao, P. K. Mahanta, K. Karunanidhi). Their presence together on the same ride underscores that this instability affected every political stream, not just one.
The cartoon thus serves as a visual summary of the chapter’s core theme: the transition from a one-party-dominant system to a multi-party coalition era, where politics became a high-speed, unpredictable ride for both leaders and voters.