How do regional parties influence foreign policy? Insights from multilevel coalitional bargaining in India (original) (raw)
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Coalition politics and the making of Indian foreign policy: a new research program
India Review, 2019
Do Indian regional parties influence foreign policy and under which conditions? Some foreign policy studies have shown that certain coalition-building configurations have facilitated the inclusion of the concerns of small parties in the foreign policy debate. Other works have looked at the role of decentralization and federal power-arrangement in providing more control to political sub-units over the external affairs of a state. Those separate scholarships provide interesting insights to account for the multi-level nature of coalition-building in a federal and pluralistic polity like India. Bridging these two literatures, I argue that the interdependence of regional and national coalition building processes (visible in federal settings) create locked-in alliances between national parties and regional parties which affect foreign policymaking. In these contexts, India's national parties have to, under certain conditions, take into account the preferences of regional parties when designing foreign policies. This article looks at the hypothesized causal mechanisms and expectations through two illustrative case studies of India's foreign policy.
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An analysis of 1,153 episodes of international engagements of India’s states from 1996 to 2017 reveals that shifts in foreign policy engagement of selected state governments primarily reflect alterations in the subnational incumbents’ political affiliation with the Union government. Several qualitative case studies shed light on how the central government’s inclusion of subnational governments’ perspectives and representatives in foreign affairs is highly partisan and profoundly political.
A look at Coalition Politics and the Making of Indian Foreign Policy
Prismatic Horizons: Journal of Social Science and Humanities, 2024
The decline of congress began after the emergency. The formation of a coalition government in India in 1977 laid the foundation for the era of coalition politics. Hence the new trend changed the scenario of foreign policy in India. India’s relation with the world has been seen a fundamental change over the last decade and half. The internal political structure of a country has an important impact upon the countries international affairs. Alliances of convenience between disparate political parties, such as the Congress, BJP and the Communist are often formed with selfish motives and hidden agendas such coalition based on political expediency may be in the interest of the parties that come together to form the government, but they are definitely not in the interest of the nation. In the past many coalition governments both at the centre and the state, have collapsed before the end of their terms due to the inherent weakness of any coalition set up. But phenomenon of coalition government, now an inescapable reality in India’s political life, has given small regional parties a greater in governance including foreign policy. The aim of the study is to analyse the Coalition Politics and the Making of Indian Foreign Policy.
How Indian foreign policy negotiates federalism: a case study of the role of the constituent states
Stosunki Międzynarodowe – International Relations, 2022
India’s centre-heavy federalism suffered dual downturns in the 1990s, with the tides of globalization and economic liberalization challenging the sanctity of borders and the incidence of coalition politics increasing the salience of regional equations and demands. But Indian foreign policy in the 1990s remained the almost exclusive preserve of the Centre, ruled by several coalitions of political parties like the National Front (1989-1996), United Front (1996-1998). As Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popular yet controversial regime is poised at the middle of its second term in 2022 (beginning in 2019), the continued showcasing of the Centre’s leadership in foreign policy decisions, high-profile bilateral and multilateral engagements, bold collisions with uneasy neighbours, are only matched with the unilateralism exhibited within the borders. Given the oft-reported instances of acute voices of assertions by the states on various issues ranging from illegal and forced migration, resour...
The Growing Power of States in India's Foreign Policy
This study examines the role of sub-national diplomacy in India with respect to four neighboring countries – Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China – and assesses the nature and consequences of such interactions for immediate policy shifts and in wider institutional terms. Except for five states – Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Telengana – all other states in India have international land or maritime borders which make a study of this nature very pertinent. This study focuses on those states that have been more inclined to engage in India's foreign and security policy making. Keywords India – federalization – foreign policy – negotiation
How parties impact the trajectories of federalism: India
India Review
The article examines the interface between the party system and the trajectories of center-state interactions in independent India. It argues that the Constituent Assembly put in place a strong-center model of federalism, giving the center much greater leverage than the states. The structural features envisaged in the constitution implicitly give us the image of a rigid framework and do not account for the dynamic nature of federalism. The discussion in the article, however, shows that there have been periods when the central state has been able to achieve a greater level of vertical integration, overriding the existing institutional frameworks. This has occurred whenever a party, owing to a lack of federal political culture and being under a person-centered leadership, managed to achieve politywide legislative dominance. Whenever it happens, the constituent states are reduced to more like administrative units, accepting directives from the center, as the existing federal safeguard mechanism loses its efficacy. However, here again the degree of integration has varied depending on the ruling strategy of the party leader, the party's internal structure, and the level of resistance put up by the state units, and the opposition parties. In sharp contrast, when, due to political and economic transitions, the state-based parties gained prominence at the national level, then they invariably pushed for greater decentralization, strengthening the existing federal institutional safeguards, and striving to make the constituent states more autonomous political and economic units.
Coalitions and Foreign-Policy-Making: Insights from the Global South
European Political Science, 2016
This article makes two arguments. First, it seeks to warn foreign policy analysis scholars against directly applying models and theories developed in the context of West European countries to other regions such as the Global South. More specifically, we highlight some of the particularities present in cases from the Global South that might limit any direct attempt to apply hypothesised mechanisms derived from the existing coalition foreign-policy literature. Second, we argue that the scholarship on coalition foreign policy needs to more systematically integrate the lessons and insights from coalition experiences from the Global South. We look at the recent Indian experience with coalitions to illustrate some of our arguments about the benefits and limitations of the existing scholarship as well as to explore the need to develop new frameworks.
2005
Regionalism has remained perhaps the most potent force in Indian politics ever since independence (1947), if not before. It has remained the main basis of many regional political parties which have been governing many states since the late 1960s. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ruled at the federal level from 1999 to 2004, was but a medley of various region-based parties. Interestingly enough, regionalism has also remained the main basis of the communist movements in India which have grown in close identification with the regions, and are sustained therein. In the post-independence period, region is said to have often vied with the nation. The post-independence resurgence of regionalism in many parts of India baffled the observers of Indian politics, and offered as the basis of prediction of the country's "imminent balkanization" (Harrison 1960). The "crisis thesis" which was implicit in Harriso...
IMPACT OF COALITION POLITICS ON FEDERAL INSTITUTIONS -THE INDIAN EXPERIENCE
Wesleyan Journal of Research, 2020
India, having adopted a parliamentary political structure of government within a federal system, has constitutionally provided for parliamentary structures at both the Centre and in the States. The same principles and norms of parliamentary practice are applied at both levels substantially. Innovations experimented and successfully operated at the Centre or in anyone of the States may be accepted as models or precedents by the rest whenever found useful. It is mostly the Westminster model of parliamentary structures that the Indian Constitution has adopted for both the Central and State governments. However, the Indian political culture is different from that of the UK. The structures have had to be" functionally modified. India being a vast subcontinent with many culturally and ethnically diverse groups, political behaviour within the country, has proved to be different from region to region or State to State. Ethnic loyalties and cultural diversities have tended to produce political behaviours different from each other but within the same constitutional and legal framework. Therefore although the legal framework is uniform throughout the country, political behaviour and practices tend to be different.