1989 School of Arts and Sciences graduate Eswaran Sridharan, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India in New Delhi, led a seminar at CASI’s Penn campus counterpart this week discussing the power of political coalitions and proportional representation in India.
His presentation centered around his recent book, “Indian Politics and International Relations,” which examines India’s political coalition system over the last 20-to-30 years. Sridharan and guests at the talk emphasized that the topics covered are relevant to Penn students because they matter on the global scale.
Sridharan, who received a Ph.D. in political science from Penn, is also the editor-in-chief of the refereed Routledge journal India Review.
He explained how India uses a coalition-based political system, where parties form based on regional, linguistic, and ideological alliances. Since the late 20th century, multiple parties have shared power and allied to form a government. One of these parties is the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has allied with regional parties in preelectoral coalitions.
At the event, Sridharan also took attendees through each chapter of his new book, focusing on minority parties and their efforts to gain proportional representation. He later examined the power of alliances by quoting examples when a lack of allies undermined the BJP party, stating that “preelectoral coalitions are a very important part of coalition theory and coalition studies, not just coalition governments and their positions.”
The scholar also examined congruent coalitions, political funding, and intra-party democracy. He explained how preelectoral coalitions and identity politics are “opposed and contradictory” because the party “has to dilute their ideology to win.” He brought up India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who Sridharan says is more popular than his party.
“They are voting for him, not for the party, not for the BJP,” he added.
Apart from this book, Sridharan has written and edited several other books and journals on South Asia. These have spanned topics of global connections, development, and industry.
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In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian after the seminar, he stated that he “tries to make connections across countries and across theories to explain what’s going on in India and elsewhere too.” One such connection to United States politics, he noted, is the fact that “lower-income voters vote for parties associated with the right and with the better off.”
Rashi Sabherwal, a Ph.D. student at Penn and CASI doctoral fellow, also drew parallels to the United States. She emphasized to the DP that society is seeing a similar “general movement towards more popularistic, authoritarian styles of governance.”
Sabherwal added that Sridharan is “very good at not just … understanding patterns in the aggregate, but also paying attention to how specific states contribute to aggregate shifts.”
Jack Nagel, a former associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and retired political science professor, also said he was compelled by the topic in an interview with the DP. He recognized how the type of political system discussed at the seminar can often be problematic, and he “wants to see how it works in India” and how change might be prompted by it.
When asked what he wanted Penn students to gain from his talk, Sridharan said that Penn students “would benefit from this broad comparative perspective” that uses India as a lens for politics everywhere.
