The mechanism of the party.

The top leaders of the party can be seen involved in the politics of power at the lower levels for the obvious reason of preserving and strengthening the roots of their leadership. They struggle for getting rid of those who are prepared to pull on with them. "What they want is not merely a Congress party in power in the States, but also a Congress Party the leaders of which are prepared to co-operate with them. So, there is a large amount of intrigue, and counter intrigue, between leaders at the top and leaders at the State level though they belong to the same party. It is a struggle for power and influence. It is a struggle centering around personalities and not policies and programme s."36 CRITICAL APPRAISAL A critical study of the Indian party system shows that it suffers from several serious weaknesses. In the first place, the factor of ideological orientation is missing in most of the parties. Not the principles but personalities have their determining influence. Leaving aside few parties like the Swatantra and Jana Sangh on the rightist and Communist parties on the leftist spectrums of the Indian stasiological scene, all other parties are like ideologically neutral organizations more concerned with their attitude towards personalities than with a clear- cut commitment to some particular type of social and economic philosophy. Secondly, the Congress party has remained so dominant nationally that India is often taken as the model of uniparty state. What is surprising is that this party has been in power ever since the advent of independence without assuming any ideological character. It includes in its ranks from pure rightists to pure leftists all pulling the organization in their own directions. What has been keeping it like a viable entity is its flexible character with a left-of-the-centre orientation as given by Nehru. Thirdly, there are some regional parties that have a distinctly communal character. Since these parties as Akali Dal in Punjab and DMK in Tamilnadu nave been in power and they may also remain in power in time to come, it may be feared that they might contribute to the prevalence of tendencies opposed to the forces of nationalism, secularism, democracy and socialism. Finally, what should be described as the biggest weakness of the Indian party system is the absence of commitment to discipline. Leaders of various parties off and on change their party affiliations just for the sake of the loaves and fishes of office. It creates the serious problem of political defections. The frequency with which these deplorable acts of defection have taken place in the recent part has resulted in the deformation of popular ministries. The result is chaos in administration. Not my that, we find off and on movement in the direction of fragmentation and polarization. Rampant factionalism leads to the splits in the ranks of parties. Thus we find two Congresses, two Alkali Dals, three Communist parties and three organizations