The Rise and Fall of the Janata Dal

Abstract

In the Ninth General Election in India in November 1989, the Janata Dal (JD, or Dal) emerged as the main opposition party to the Congress (I) Party. The JD that was formed in October 1988 comprised three distinct political factions. One wing of the party, led by Chandra Shekhar, reached back to the now defunct socialist parties of India and a splinter of the old Congress Party of Morarji Desai. Another wing, which had been led by Charan Singh until his death in May 1987, came from the middle peasantry and so-called backward castes of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The JD's third wing consisted of Congress dissident leaders, such as former Defense Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Arif Mohammed Khan, and Arun Nehru who had defected from the Congress Party in 1987 on the corruption issue. Without deviating significantly from Congress Party ideology, this diverse group waged a successful 1989 election campaign based largely upon the themes of anticorruption, rampant inflation, and the failure of Rajiv Gandhi as a political leader.' In the November 1989 election, the JD won 142 seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house), and its small National Front coalition partners, the Telegu Desam of Andhra Pradesh (two seats) and the Congress (S) of Kerala (one seat), won three additional seats for a Front total of 145 out of a grand total of 529. One of the primary explanations for the success of the Dal was its ability to work out a significant number (89) of effective electoral seat adjustments with the other major opposition parties-the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in northern and western India and the Left Front (the two Indian Communist parties and two small Marxist parties, the Forward