'Emergence of regional parties has deepened India's democracy'

The regionalisation of India's political landscape has decentralised power and has deepened the country's democracy, says London School of Economics (LSE) professor, Sumantra Bose.
"For all the flaws and vices of many of contemporary India's regional political figures, the regionalisation of India's politics is a democratic outcome that has emerged through the dynamic evolution of India's democracy over six decades," Bose told PTI in an interview.
In his book "Transforming India: Challenges to the World's largest democracy", Bose has described how diversity in India's political landscape has caught up with diversity of its culture over the years.
Published by Pan Macmillan, the book tells a story of how democracy has evolved in India from the 1950s and how India has transformed from a country dominated by a single nationwide party into a robust multiparty and federal union.

According to Bose, the regionalisation of India's politics in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first and second decades of this century has developed democratically through popular will, because demons in more and more Indian states have chosen to vote for state specific parties and politicians.
The author describes YSR Congress, a breakaway party from Congress in Andhra Pradesh that is named after States former Congress Chief Minister YSR Reddy as one of the latest rising star in India's regionalised political landscape.

"The party is led by the deceased leader's son, who faces serious criminal charges of accumulating vast amount of money and assets through blatant corruption during his strongman father's term in office," Bose writes in the book.

However, that has not prevented the new regional party from gaining mass popularity among the electorate in Andhra Pradesh at the expense of Congress, he elaborates.
"The emergence of increasing number of wide variety of parties representing various kinds of segmental identities and interests has resulted into a huge spectrum of ethnic and sub ethnic, caste and sub castes,linguistic and sub linguistic permutations and combinations on India's political landscape," he says.
However, Bose is of the opinion that to make the best and positive use of this diversity on political landscape, the regional parties also have bigger responsibilities to shoulder.

"It is crucial in the early twenty first century for regionalist leaders governing the states to break out of and transcend the boundaries of caste, religion and political partisanship," he says.