Divided We Govern

Ruparelia confronts one of the most striking developments in modern Indian politics: the increasing influence of communist, regional, and lower caste-orientated socialist parties on politics since the late 1980s. In particular he traces these their attempts to construct a progressive 'third force' vis-avis the historically dominant Indian National Congress and Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the subsequent decline of the broader Indian left as a collective political power.Ruparelia develops an original theoretical argument, deploying an innovative conceptual grammar of institutions, power, and judgment to explain the vicissitudes of the contemporary Indian left over the past two decades. Divided We Govern is a fine-grained analytic narrative to explain the vagaries of power-sharing in contemporary Indian democracy. It draws together a variety of tools and resources to create a dynamic causal account of multiparty governments and their function - only partly captured by many scholarly analyses and the theories on which they rely. Ruparelia's narrative comprises information gathered from newspapers and periodicals, party manifestoes, and government documents; original statistical analyses of official electoral data and national election surveys; and the rare testimonies of senior party leaders, high-ranking government officials, and seasoned political journalists, obtained through dozens of in-depth interviews and intensive fieldwork.