Regional Parties: Blessing Or Curse

By Dr.Raj Rindani:

India is the second most populated country. So, it has people having different cultures, languages, religions, traditions etc. As it is said, “Unity in Diversity”, we can use it vice versa, too.

India has a great diversity in political parties. According to the Election Commission of India, there are more than 1200 parties in our country. Only 6 of them have gained the status of National level party and all the others are Regional parties. Regional parties are blessings for the regions, we can say. These parties are well acquainted to the needs and mind set of people of the region. Sometimes national parties fail to fulfil those needs and regional ones do that successfuly. So, there is development of the region and consequently, of the country. There are many parties like DMK (Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam), AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) in Tamilnadu, TDP (Telugu Desam Party) in Andhra, AITMC (All India Trinamool Congress) in West Bengal, Shiv Sena and MNS in Maharashtra etc. who are taking regional issues to the national platform for a better solution.Thus, we can say that regional parties are blessings for their respective places.

But as every coin has two sides, these regional parties can be a curse at the same time. Some of these parties break votes of the national parties in elections and then they make an alliance at the national level to form a government. After that these parties sometime get into illegal activities for getting a ministry or some personal benefits. At this time they stop the work of development and make the government unstable. Doing such things, they can’t be less than a curse.

If there is a problem, there is always a solution. There can be a type of set up where out of the 543 seats of Lok Sabha, some should be reserved for regional parties which aren’t to be counted to form the government. By this the representation of region remains same and we can get rid of those parties who are making the system weak. (Here the regional parties will be given importance for the regional issues as before because still their support is needed for alliance in the state elections.) Thus, we can make the results of curse less effective.