Class 10 Social Science Chapter 21 Political Parties Notes in English

1Why Do We Need Political Parties?

Ask any ordinary citizen, even someone who has never read the Constitution and knows nothing about how government works, and they will still know something about political parties. Parties are one of the most visible institutions of a democracy. But visible does not mean popular: most people tend to blame parties for all that is wrong with our democracy and political life, seeing them as partial, partisan and divisive.

That raises a fair question: do we actually need political parties? A century ago, hardly any country had them. Today, hardly any democracy runs without them. To see why, we first need to know what a party actually is.

“Collective good” is itself a contested idea: different people have different views on what is good for society. That is exactly why a party is known by which part of society it stands for, which policies it supports, and whose interests it upholds.

1.1 The three parts of a party

The chapter states that a political party has three components:

• the leaders,
• the active members, and
• the followers.

1.2 What does a political party do?

A party fills political offices and exercises political power by performing a set of functions. The chapter lists exactly seven:

1.3 Do we really need parties?

Imagine, just for a moment, an election with no parties at all: every candidate standing as an independent. No one could promise any major policy change. A government might still form, but its utility would remain ever uncertain; elected representatives would be accountable to their constituency, but nobody would be responsible for how the whole country is run. This thought experiment, not a real historical situation, is exactly how the chapter explains why modern representative democracies cannot function without parties.

Real-world evidence backs this up: in the non-party based elections to the panchayat in many states, parties do not contest formally, yet the village generally gets split into more than one faction, and each faction puts up a “panel” of its candidates. That is exactly what a party does, even when it isn’t officially called one.

The rise of political parties is directly linked to the emergence of representative democracies. As societies became large and complex, they needed some agency to gather different views on various issues and to present these to the government, and a way to bring representatives together so that a responsible government could be formed. Parties fulfil these needs.

2How Many Parties Should We Have?

In a democracy, any group of citizens is formally free to form a political party. More than 750 parties are registered with the Election Commission of India, though usually only a handful are effectively in the race to win elections and form the government. So how many major parties are actually good for a democracy?

2.1 One-party and two-party systems

The multiparty system often appears very messy and leads to political instability; at the same time, it allows a variety of interests and opinions to enjoy political representation. No party system is a country’s deliberate choice: it evolves over a long time, shaped by a society’s own nature, its social and regional divisions, its political history and its election system. India has evolved a multiparty system because the social and geographical diversity in such a large country is not easily absorbed by two or even three parties. No system is ideal for all countries and all situations.

The chapter applies this to the States of India too. It names three major types of party systems that exist at the State level, and asks you to find the names of at least two States for each:

• Two-party system
• Multiparty system with two alliances
• Multiparty system

The chapter itself does not name the States, so use recent election results to find examples.

3Popular Participation in Political Parties

It is often said that parties are in crisis because they are very unpopular and citizens are indifferent to them. Large-sample surveys conducted over several decades, reported in the SDSA Team’s State of Democracy in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), show this belief is only partly true for India.

3.1 What the surveys show

So low trust and high participation exist side by side. Earlier in the chapter, while explaining the seventh function, the book notes that people feel close to parties “even when they do not fully trust them”, because a local party leader is easier to approach than a government officer.

4National Parties

Federal democracies everywhere tend to have two kinds of parties: those present in only one federal unit, and those present in several or all units, called national parties. India follows the same pattern. Every party must register with the Election Commission, which treats all parties equally but gives special facilities, including a unique election symbol reserved for that party’s official candidates, to large, established “recognised political parties.”

According to this classification, there are six recognised national parties in the country, as per the notification of the Election Commission of India issued in 2023: AAP, BJP, BSP, CPI-M, INC and NPP.

4.1 The six recognised national parties

5State Parties

Other than the national parties, most of the major parties of the country are classified by the Election Commission as “State parties,” commonly called regional parties. But the book is explicit: these parties need not be regional in ideology or outlook. Some of these parties are all India parties that happen to have succeeded only in some states. The book’s map of State parties (page 56) gives details of these parties.

Over the last three decades, State parties have grown in number and strength, making Parliament more diverse. In fact, no national party could win a Lok Sabha majority on its own until 2014, so national parties were compelled to ally with State parties. Since 1996, nearly every State party has had a chance to be part of a national coalition government, which the book says has strengthened both federalism and democracy in the country.

6Challenges to Political Parties

Because parties are democracy’s most visible face, people naturally blame them first when democracy’s working goes wrong. Popular dissatisfaction, in India and worldwide, centres on four problem areas.

On the first challenge: parties do not keep membership registers, do not hold organisational meetings, and do not conduct internal elections regularly. Ordinary members do not get sufficient information on what happens inside the party and have no means or connections to influence its decisions. Those who disagree with the leadership find it difficult to continue in the party. Power concentrates with one or a few leaders, and loyalty to the leader becomes more important than loyalty to the party’s own principles.

The second challenge follows from the first: without transparent internal procedures, leaders can favour people close to them, including their own family, for top positions. This is unfair to other members, and bad for democracy, because people with little experience or public support end up holding power.

The third challenge is money and criminal influence, especially at election time: parties tend to nominate candidates who already have, or can raise, large sums, and rich people and companies who give funds to parties tend to have influence on the party’s policies and decisions. In some cases, parties support criminals who can win elections.

The fourth challenge is the lack of a meaningful choice for voters. A meaningful choice needs parties to be genuinely different from one another, but in recent years there has been a decline in the ideological differences among parties in most parts of the world. The book’s own example: the difference between Britain’s Labour Party and Conservative Party is very little; they agree on more fundamental aspects and differ only in details of how policies are framed and implemented. In our country too, the differences among all the major parties on economic policies have reduced. Sometimes people cannot even elect very different leaders, because the same set of leaders keep shifting from one party to another.

7How Can Parties Be Reformed?

The chapter poses this as a genuine open question, not a settled answer: are parties willing to reform, and if not, can citizens force them to? Three concrete steps have already been taken.

7.1 Reforms already tried

Beyond these, the chapter records suggestions that have not yet been accepted by political parties: a law regulating parties’ own internal affairs (a compulsory member register, following their own constitution, an independent authority for disputes, open elections to top posts); a mandatory minimum of about one-third of tickets, plus a quota in decision-making bodies, for women; and state funding of elections, in kind (petrol, paper, telephone) or in cash based on votes won last time.

Two other routes to reform, neither one requiring new law: ordinary citizens can put pressure on parties through petitions, publicity and agitation; and people who want better politics can join a political party themselves, since the quality of democracy depends on how much people actually participate in it. The chapter says: “The problem of bad politics can be solved by more and better politics.” It returns to this theme in its final chapter.