There are many individuals belonging to the two largest political parties in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress often argue that the country’s polity is essentially bipolar and that smaller parties have no alternative but to align themselves with one or the other. It can be contended that the process of fragmentation of the polity is not yet over and that smaller parties, including regional and caste-based outfits, do not necessarily have to become appendages of either the BJP or the Congress.

The rise of the BJP is seen as a process of the party occupying the centrist political space vacated by the Congress. It is true that the period that witnessed the fastest growth of the BJP as an electoral force has coincided with the phase of the most rapid decline of the Congress. The marginalization of the Congress in UP has not led to the BJP becoming a party with unquestioned dominance in the state. On the contrary, the party was reduced to third position in UP, behind the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in the recent Assembly elections. In Bihar, the Congress has been reduced to a marginal presence over the last decade-and-a-half, but its decline has not led to the BJP becoming the dominant party. Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal or its forerunner, the Janata Dal, were the main agents of the erosion of the Congress Party’s vote banks.

In Orissa, Assam and Karnataka, the BJP has grown rapidly, more often than not by consolidating the anti-Congress political forces. If one looks at the period between the late-1960s and the mid-1980s, there were already signs of the Congress losing ground gradually to regional parties. Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, traditional strongholds of the Congress, witnessed similar trends even if the process did not lead to the complete marginalization of the Congress. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party rose from almost nowhere to become a powerful challenge to the Congress in the mid-1980s and has remained the main contender for power with the Congress. Similarly, in Maharashtra it was the rise of the Shiv Sena followed by NCP rather than the BJP, which first raised questions about just how firm the Congress' grip on power in the state was.

It is the resentment that has been lapped by various political groups leading to the fragmentation of the polity. The resentment against the elite extends to a rejection of all that the elite stood for, including the notion of the Indian identity over-riding sub-national identities. The world of political possibilities in India seems to be simplifying into the frightening choice before most of the modern world’s political communities craft imperfect democratic rules by which increasingly mixed groups of people can carry on together a existence, or the illusion of a permanent and homogeneous, unmixed single nation, a single collective self without any trace of a defiling otherness. The fragmentation of India’s polity is undoubtedly an outcome of the feeling among very large sections of the population that they had been left out of the development process.