Significance of Political Parties in India

The Constitution of India, as originally enacted, does not mention political parties at all — and yet no election, no government formation, and no functioning of Parliament in the seventy-five years since has happened without them. This topic explains how an institution absent from the constitutional text became indispensable to the constitutional system in practice.

In two minutes

Political parties are the essential organising link between millions of individual voters and the machinery of government, translating scattered public opinion into candidates, choices, governing programmes and an accountable opposition, without which a large representative democracy like India's could not function in practice.

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