ABSTRACT
The party system in post-independence India was described by Rajni Kothari as ‘a system of one party dominance’, where the Congress was the ‘party of consensus’ and the opposition consisted of ‘parties of pressure’, because none of them were capable of offering a viable alternative government.1 While this supposed consensus was continually contested, as we have already seen, what actually saved the Congress from losing power was the fact that the opposition remained extremely fragmented – both on the Left and on the Right. And these differences arose sometimes out of personality clashes, and sometimes out of conflicts of perspectives on the future of the nation.
