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Regional political parties are India’s new electoral box offices. Analysts speculate they will be the key to government formation after the next general elections, so the two competing national parties — the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — are cracking tough political equations to win over as many of them as possible. There are valid reasons for this. Since 1984, not a single national party has formed a government on its own. The 1980s and 90s witnessed the electoral boom of regional political parties, which have been expanding both in number as well as in vote share.
In fact, the number of national parties has come down. In the first Lok Sabha elections in 1952, of the 55 parties that contested, 18 were regional parties. The number went up to 36 in the 2004 elections. In the 1984 general elections, the regional parties got 11.2 per cent of the votes; in 2009, their share went up to 28.4 per cent. In the past 20 years, the share of regional parties in total votes has consistently increased. For the next elections in 2014, analysts estimate regional parties will contest in 150-180 seats where the two national parties may not be significant players.
There is already a certainty in mainstream political dialogue that national parties have ceded space to regional parties. This, according to political pundits, is because the national parties have not been able to address regional ‘aspirations’.
The big question, therefore, is: have the regional parties lived up to these ‘aspirations’? Much before the 1980s when these parties came to national prominence, they were dominant players in many states like Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Odisha and Tamil Nadu. India’s long experiment with regional parties offers little evidence to suggest that regional parties performed differently than national parties. They may have fueled regional pride but in terms of regional development, their performance hardly differed from that of national parties. Rather, regional parties now adopt and implement policies of national parties more aggressively at the state level.
The rise of regional parties was sharp in the late 1980s and 90s when the country saw acute polarisation of voters in terms of socio-economic groups. During this period voters from the disadvantaged sections took greater part in voting. Many regional parties used this to carve out their political identities. They promised development and social and economic equity in the face of economic liberalisation, at a time when regional disparity was stark and livelihood crisis was severe.