Transitions in State Politics

The Transitions in State Politics series connects nationwide political changes and State-specific shifts that have been shaping over past few decades. If the moment around 1990s marked a major change in Indian politics because of a firm decline of the Congress party, the election of a majority government of the BJP in 2014 marked another major shift in party competition that future analyses of Indian politics will have to take note of. If the 1990s marked the unprecedented rise of State-level parties, development after 2014 have witnessed the return of single-party dominance (the second dominant party system) without necessarily eclipsing the State level forces. Another continuity between these two moments is about the rise and consolidation of Hindutva. Thus, both 1990 and 2014 thus continue to shape India’s political scenario in contemporary times.

The volumes on State Politics in this series will therefore situate the politics of respective States on this dual axis of change from 1990 to 2014. The present Series, Transitions in State Politics, aims at combining the long term trends in the politics of each State with key transitions in the post-1990 period and highlight the changes occasioned by the post-2014 party system.

Importance of state politics has been recognized since the 1960s. Around the 2000s, emergence of States as ‘the effective arena of political choices’ was recognized as a major shift in State politics. Since the 1990s, rise of an intensely fragmented multi-party system, state specific variations in political choices, emergence of regional parties, their interventions at the ‘national’ level politics, crystallization of regional identities as well as the uneven region specific rhythms of capitalist development have all contributed to the rise of States as an important unit of political analysis in India. Despite the rise of the second dominant party system since 2014, States continue to exhibit their independent political trajectories and characteristics. At the same time, the rise of BJP in 2014 has deeply impacted nature of competitive politics in most States. Conceptually, this development has thrown a challenge of reconciling the dynamic of polity-wide and the subnational political processes.

Competitive politics in States does not take shape in isolation. It has at least three key contextual reference points. In spite of radical transformations from time to time in its internal politics, each State has developed a State-specific character in terms of competitive politics, style of governance and leadership patterns. Second, notwithstanding its peculiarity, politics of the State also shapes in the context of polity-wide trends, responding to them, absorbing those trends and occasionally defying those trends. So, the ‘all-India’ provides the second context. Thirdly, competitive politics whether at the subnational—State—level or at the all-India level, has a firm context in socio-economic processes. While it may be a tall order to pack into one volume full-fledged analyses of these three, the volumes in this Series are aware of these three contextual factors.

Each volume in this series, focussing on a particular State acquaints the newcomer to the study of that State with what the State has to offer in terms of its own specific trajectory of politics in the three decades since 1990s and at the same time, for the expert immersed in the politics of that State, each volume presents with key riddles that require further analysis and scholarly attention. Together, these volumes will not only add to the understanding of respective States but also push the student of Indian politics in taking a more comparative view of cross-State trends and divergences. In this sense, volumes in this Routledge Series belong not only to the sub-discipline of State Politics but also add to the limited scholarship on Comparative State Politics in India.