ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the evolving nature of democracy in India that hardly corresponds to any copybook description. One can thus safely argue that India is a creative democracy for not only it is being constantly reinvented, but also redesigned to capture the new experiments in a non-Western socio-political context. The Indian democratic experiment is innovative not only in terms of articulation, but also in substance. Political institutions that hold the spirit of democracy are constantly restructured in view of the constantly changing socio-economic milieu, giving it distinctive localized characteristics within the larger universal paradigm of liberal democracy. Although politics at the 'national' level continue to be dominated by select political parties that are pan-Indian in electoral and organizational terms, the party system is now highly fractured since there is hardly a dominant pattern in the regions that constitute India. Indira Gandhi's tragic end catapulted her son, Rajiv Gandhi, a reluctant entrant to politics, into centre-stage of Indian politics.
