How Indian Parties Work Internally

Indian political parties are among the most important institutions in the country's governance — they recruit leaders, select candidates, set policy agendas, and constitute the primary mechanism through which citizens access the state. But they are also among India's most weakly institutionalised democratic organisations: party constitutions are rarely followed, internal elections are infrequently held and often manufactured, candidate selection is dominated by party leadership rather than member democratic processes, and financial accounts are opaque despite legal disclosure requirements. 

The Election Commission of India's powers over political parties are limited to registration, symbol allocation, and anti-defection enforcement; it has no authority to mandate intra-party democracy, transparent finances, or candidate selection processes.

Representational Image: How Indian Parties Work Internally

The internal workings of India's major parties vary significantly. The BJP has the most extensive organisational infrastructure — a formal party structure with elected bodies at the mandal (sub-district), district, state, and national levels, supplemented by the RSS's parallel volunteer network. Internal elections occur with greater regularity than in most parties, though critics note they are sometimes procedural exercises rather than genuinely competitive. 

The Congress party has a long history of formal democratic structures that have been progressively hollowed out since Indira Gandhi's centralisation in the 1970s; the party presidency has been de facto controlled by the Nehru-Gandhi family for most of the past half-century, with internal elections held only under sustained pressure. Regional parties — RJD, AIADMK, SP, BSP, TMC — tend toward even greater centralisation around a single leader, with the party functioning as a personal vehicle rather than an institutionalised democratic organisation.

What You Need to Know

• The Election Commission recognises 6 national parties and approximately 58 state parties as of 2024; recognised parties must meet minimum vote share or seat thresholds; recognition provides entitlements including reserved symbols, state-funded premises, and free broadcasting time during elections.
• The Election Commission requires parties to submit annual audited accounts of income and expenditure; ADR analysis found that a significant share of party income (35% average) comes from "unknown sources" — cash donations below the ₹20,000 threshold that require no donor identification; this opacity is structural to India's party finance system.
• The BJP Party Constitution provides for elections to the National Executive and National President through an electoral college of state and national delegates; in practice, these elections are typically consensus arrangements rather than genuine competitions; Amit Shah served as BJP President from 2014 to 2020, JP Nadda from 2020 to the present, both effectively serving at Modi's preference.
• The anti-defection law (Tenth Schedule) prevents MPs and MLAs from voting against their party's directions without risking disqualification; this law, intended to prevent horse-trading, has the side effect of removing intra-party diversity from legislative expression — MPs who disagree with their party's positions cannot express that disagreement in votes.
• The Election Commission's recognition system creates perverse incentives: registered party leaders can claim the party name and symbol in courts when factions split; the controversies around Congress recognition in multiple states, the NCP split (Ajit Pawar vs Sharad Pawar, 2023), and the Shiv Sena split (Eknath Shinde vs Uddhav Thackeray, 2022) illustrate how the EC's recognition power becomes a tool in internal party power struggles.

How It Works in Practice

1. Candidate selection as the real decision: The most consequential internal party decision is candidate selection for elections. In most Indian parties, this decision rests with the national or state leadership (effectively one or two senior leaders); formal processes (candidate selection committees, surveys, ward surveys) may exist but are filtered through leadership discretion. The criteria typically include: caste arithmetic of the constituency; local financial capacity of the candidate; personal loyalty to party leadership; and likelihood of winning.

2. Factionalism as internal politics: Large parties — particularly Congress, which governed without strong organisational democracy for decades — develop informal factions representing different caste groups, geographic regions, or ideological tendencies. These factions compete for ticket allocation, ministerial berths, and eventually party leadership. Congress's inability to manage its factional politics — visible in the revolts of the G23 group (2020 letter demanding intraparty democracy), the defections of Jyotiraditya Scindia to BJP and Ghulam Nabi Azad to form his own party — reflects the accumulated cost of suppressing internal democracy.

3. Regional party structures: Regional parties like SP, BSP, TMC, and RJD are effectively personal vehicles: the party's entire existence and direction flows from the founder-leader. SP exists because Mulayam Singh Yadav built it and his son Akhilesh leads it; BSP exists because Kanshi Ram built it and Mayawati leads it. These parties have limited organisational depth below the leadership; their viability depends on the leader's personal electoral standing.

4. The BJP-RSS relationship: BJP's internal dynamics include a parallel relationship with the RSS that has no formal constitutional basis but significant practical importance. The RSS provides the BJP with: full-time volunteer organisers (pracharaks) who staff party organisational positions; ideological training and formation for leaders; and a veto or influence over major party decisions including prime ministerial succession questions. The RSS's assertion of organisational authority over the BJP after Modi's 2024 relative setback was documented in Foreign Affairs (June 2025).

5. Party finances and the opacity problem: Despite legal requirements for financial disclosure, the opacity of Indian party finances is structural. Before electoral bonds (2017), the primary opacity was cash donation below ₹20,000 threshold. Electoral bonds introduced formal banking-channel donations but made them anonymous to the public. Post the Supreme Court's bonds judgment (2024), parties are back to the pre-bonds system — formal donations above ₹20,000 disclosed, cash below that threshold opaque. The ₹20,000 threshold was set in the 1990s; at current value, this covers a large proportion of political donations.

What People Often Misunderstand

• ECI cannot mandate intraparty democracy: Despite regular recommendations from the Law Commission and civil society, the Election Commission has no statutory authority to require parties to hold genuine internal elections or to make candidate selection processes transparent; this is a legislative gap that no government has filled because parties of all types benefit from the existing system.
• Party constitutions and actual party practice are often entirely different: Most Indian parties have formal constitutions mandating elections, representation of women and SC/ST in party bodies, and financial transparency; actual practice routinely departs from these mandates without legal consequence.
• Anti-defection law has strengthened party leadership at members' expense: The Tenth Schedule was designed to prevent corruption (bribing MPs to defect); it has had the structural side effect of making party leadership's control over elected members near-absolute, since members who vote against leadership face disqualification.
• Party mergers and splits are determined by the Speaker and ECI using contested criteria: The Speaker (Lok Sabha) or Chairman (Rajya Sabha) determines which faction gets the parliamentary party name when a party splits; the ECI determines which faction gets the party name and symbol for electoral purposes; the criteria used in the NCP and Shiv Sena splits in 2022–2023 were contested by the courts for years, illustrating that party internal succession is politically managed through institutional mechanisms.
• The RSS is a civil society organisation, not a party: The RSS is not registered as a political party and does not contest elections; its influence on BJP operates through informal channels — providing organisers, cadres, ideological formation, and succession guidance — rather than through formal party governance mechanisms.

What Changes Over Time

The Supreme Court's judgments in the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray vs Eknath Shinde, 2023) and NCP (Sharad Pawar vs Ajit Pawar, 2023) cases have produced a body of law on Speaker's role in anti-defection proceedings and ECI's role in party name/symbol allocation that will shape future party splits. The Congress party's performance under Rahul Gandhi since 2024 — a 99-seat Congress compared to 44-seat and 52-seat performances — has provisionally stabilised the family-led party structure; its durability beyond the current political moment remains to be tested.

Sources and Further Reading

• Vajiramandravi — Election Commission of India: https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/election-commission-of-india-eci/
• ADR — Political party finance analysis: https://adrindia.org
• Foreign Affairs — The Staying Power of India's Hindu Right: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/staying-power-indias-hindu-right

(This series is part of a long-term editorial project to explain the institutions, ideas, actors, and power structures that shape political life in India. Designed as a 25-article briefing cluster on Indian Politics, Elections & Political Power, this vertical examines how electoral democracy functions in practice — from voting systems, political parties, caste coalitions, campaign finance, and the Election Commission to ideological movements, opposition politics, coalition-building, and the exercise of political power at both national and state levels. Written in an accessible format for diplomats, investors, researchers, academics, journalists, students, policymakers, civil society organisations, and international observers, the series seeks to explain not only how India's political system is formally structured, but also how political competition, representation, and governance operate in reality. This is Vertical 5 of a larger 20-vertical knowledge architecture being developed by IndianRepublic.in under the editorial direction of Saket Suman. All articles are protected under applicable copyright laws. All Rights Reserved.)