Most invariably analyses of party politics in India must take the Congress Party as the anchor point. Certainly this is necessary with an analysis encompassing the entire nation. But even small unit or single constituency studies will on a simple probability basis usually deal with Congress-explicitly or implicitly-as the baseline against which to measure the deviations of this or that opposition phenomenon. It is 'a matter of general knowledge that Congress is the only Indian party truly in its scope and appeal. This fact was as striking in the 1967 elections as it had been in the past. Congress contested 516 of the 518 parliamentary constituencies, more than twice as many 'as its nearest national rival, the Jan Sangh. In the parliamentary races Congress polled over 59 million votes compared to the Jan Sangh's 7.1 million. Across contested constituencies, the mean percentage of the parliamentary vote for Congress was 42 while that for Jan Sangh was 21. By every measure, Congress remains the fundamental structure in the Indian party system. This centrality was incorporated a number of years ago in what has been the prevailing view of that party system, the one party dominant model.' Because it is well known, there is no need to explicate the model here. Quite clearly, however, its continued applicability will depend on the electoral fortunes of both wings of the now-divided Congress Party. This is not simply a matter of the obvious-i.e., that loss of votes may eventually lead to loss of power. Rather, recent events seem to. suggest that before losing central power to a rival, Congress would react to electoral setbacks by heating up internally. The pressures from genuine struggles for votes, the loss of organizational slack, the growing scarcity of organizational resourcesall of these would force hard decisions on the Congress leadership. It may well