ISAS Insights

India’s elections are becoming increasingly trickier for psephologists, given the heavily fractured mandates produced by such exercises. One of the plausible reasons for the electoral mandate having become increasingly splintered is the steady emergence of a large number of ‘non-national’ parties in India’s domestic politics and the electoral process. A fragmented and fractured polity with regional and state actors wielding significant bargaining power with the national parties has decisively changed the structure, nature and outcome of Indian elections since the 1990s.