Party System, Coalition Politics and Pressure Groups
India has had three party systems, not one. Each was produced by a different social coalition, and the decade 1989–99 is where the second…
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Study Notes
Everything published under Study Notes on Anantam IAS, newest first.
3454 articles
Caste, Religion and Ethnicity in Indian Politics
Modernisation theory predicted that caste and religion would fade as politics matured. The opposite happened, and the reason is that democracy gave numbers value,…
Planning and Economic Development
Indian planning was a political settlement before it was an economic technique: a capitalist economy directed by a socialist state under a Gandhian party.…
Federalism: Centre–State Relations
India is federal in structure and unitary in bias, and the balance between them has been set less by the text than by the…
Statutory Institutions and Commissions
These bodies were designed to do what a majority government cannot be trusted to do about itself. Their effectiveness therefore depends almost entirely on…
Grassroots Democracy: Panchayati Raj and Urban Local Government
The 73rd and 74th Amendments created local governments and then declined to give them functions, funds or functionaries as a matter of right. Every…
Principal Organs of the State Government
The state government mirrors the Union in form and differs in one decisive respect: the Governor is appointed by and removable at the pleasure…
Principal Organs of the Union: Executive, Legislature, Supreme Court
The syllabus asks for the envisaged role and the actual working, and the gap between them is the answer. Each organ has moved: the…
Salient Features II: Parliamentary System, Secularism and Basic Structure
Three features that together answer the question of what cannot be changed. The parliamentary system decides who governs, secularism decides on what terms a…
Salient Features I: Preamble, Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles
Part III protects the individual against the state; Part IV instructs the state to transform society. The forty-year quarrel between them is the constitutional…
Making of the Indian Constitution
The Constituent Assembly was not a blank page. It inherited a century of colonial administrative law, wrote under partition, and had to reconcile a…
Perspectives on the Indian National Movement
Historiography is not a preliminary to the topic; it is the topic. What the national movement was depends on who is taken to have…