Author: Eswaran Sridharan | Journal of Democracy

Eswaran Sridharan is academic director and chief executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India in New Delhi. He is editor most recently of Coalition Politics in India: Selected Issues at the Centre and in the States (2014).

July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3

India’s Democracy at 70: The Shifting Party Balance

Eswaran Sridharan

Read the full essay here. This article reviews the state of India’s two major national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC or Congress party), seventy years after independence in 1947 and three years after the BJP won a majority in the 2014 national election. The article looks at whether…

October 2014, Volume 25, Issue 4

India’s Watershed Vote: Behind Modi’s Victory

Eswaran Sridharan

India’s sixteenth general election ushered in a new era in the country’s politics, putting Narendra Modi and the BJP firmly in charge. What accounts for the sharp swing away from the long-dominant Congress party?

Political Parties and Democracy

Political parties are one of the core institutions of democracy. But in democracies around the world, there is growing evidence of low or declining public confidence in parties. But are they in decline, or are they simply changing their forms and functions?