Eswaran Sridharan presents his book – Indian Politics and International Relations: Underexplored Issues and Approaches – as a selection of 12 previously published papers, drawn from refereed journals and edited volumes and revised only modestly for this collection. A few of these papers were co-authored. Rather than reading this as a limitation, it is more useful to treat the volume as a single site where a set of related arguments can be encountered together, in one place, and in a form that invites comparative reading across themes. The value, then, is not in a monograph-like narrative arc, but in the cumulative clarity that emerges when these essays are read side by side, each bringing theory and evidence to bear on questions that continue to matter but are often either under-researched or poorly deliberated in the wider discourse.Indian Politics and International Relations: Underexplored Issues and Approaches, Eswaran Sridharan, Permanent Black, 2025.Substantively, the book spans two broad areas. One set of papers addresses underexplored questions in Indian politics, political economy, and political sociology. The other turns to India’s foreign relations and does so with explicit engagement with international relations theory. In this review, I focus only on Part I, the six essays on Indian politics and political economy. That choice is primarily about analytical manageability and thematic unity, since the first half offers a sufficiently dense and coherent cluster of claims about representation, institutions, party organisation, and distributive conflict to warrant treatment on its own terms. My own training in politics and public policy also shapes this emphasis on institutions and organisational logics as a starting point for analysis.Curation as method in a polarised discourse environment“Less explored topics” is a useful entry point in today’s discourse arena. Many “well explored” themes in Indian politics are not necessarily well researched or well deliberated. They are often saturated, polarised terrains, shaped by the incentives of social media and, increasingly, by exclusionary political projects. The result is a public sphere in which people have learned to talk over one another, to debate rather than to converse, and to treat disagreement as moral failure rather than as an analytical problem to be understood and managed.Against that backdrop, this compilation can be read as an attempt to rebuild the conditions for serious conversation. Not conversation as consensus-seeking, but conversation as mutual intelligibility. The essays repeatedly return to questions of representation, accommodation, institutional design, and distributive conflict. Their implicit normative horizon is not unanimity, but coexistence, justice, and redistribution within a competitive democratic order. That is a timely ambition, and the book’s value lies partly in how it models argumentation that is rigorous without being performative, and critical without being cynical.Although these essays were not originally written as a single project, Part I holds together around a shared problem: how a heterogeneous society is politically represented and governed under the constraints of electoral rules, party organisations, and changing political economy. Across the six essays, Sridharan keeps returning to mechanisms rather than slogans, asking how votes become seats, how coalitions are constructed, how parties centralise, how reforms diffuse across a federal system, and how class formation shapes the feasible pace and content of economic change.Fragmentation, explained with discipline rather than nostalgiaThe first essay traces India’s movement from Congress dominance to a fragmented, coalition-driven system between 1952 and 1999. One of its strengths is conceptual, treating fragmentation as both an electoral phenomenon (votes and seats) and an alliance phenomenon (pre- and post-poll coalitions). This dual lens matters because “more parties” is not the whole story. In a first-past-the-post system, outcomes are often decided by whether votes are aggregated into viable blocs through seat-sharing and coalition design, not simply by how many parties contest or what their national vote shares look like. Put differently, fragmentation is a re-wiring of how power is won and exercised: the decisive unit increasingly becomes the coalition arrangement rather than the standalone party.The essay’s seven competing explanations, grouped into social cleavage accounts and institutional accounts, are not presented as mutually exclusive. Instead, Sridharan shows how social mobilisation supplies new political claims, while electoral incentives structure which claims can translate into sustained party presence. The result is an argument that avoids both determinisms: fragmentation is neither simply “society expressing itself,” nor merely the mechanical effect of electoral rules. It is the outcome of changing social alignments interacting with institutional incentives and strategic alliance-building across states and the centre. The practical implication is that elections become bargaining arenas as much as mandate contests. Two parties dividing an overlapping support base in the same constituencies can inadvertently hand seats to a third party, while a pre-poll alliance between them can convert the same votes into a seat advantage. Governments formed on a post-poll alliance often depend on coalition deals and sharing ministries, not only on what voters chose. The implication is that elections do not always produce a clear mandate. A party can still end up in power if it can gather partners after the results. This gives some regional parties outsized influence, because their support can decide who governs. In return, they can demand ministries, funds for their state, or policy changes. It also makes accountability less clear, since parties can blame partners for failures and claim credit for successes.At the same time, it is worth resisting the reflex that treats this coalition logic as a democratic failure. In a society as plural as India, bargaining and alliance-making are not merely backroom distortions of the popular will; they are often the mechanism through which multiple groups secure representation and a share in governing. Coalitions can be messy, and they can certainly be abused, but they can also serve a constructive purpose: forcing accommodation, moderating extremes, and building workable common programmes across regions and social blocs that do not naturally sit together. On that reading, the “give-and-take” of coalition rule is less an ethical blemish than a practical condition of governing amid deep diversity.Intra-party democracy as an under-studied dimension of representationThe second essay, comparing intra-party democracy in India and the United States, is arguably the most normatively charged piece in Part I, and it is also among the most analytically useful. Its central claim is that meaningful intra-party democracy has declined across most major Indian parties over the long run, with authority concentrating upward into high commands. The essay is strongest where it ties internal democracy to capacity and incentives, especially the ease of manipulating membership rolls and internal elections in low-capacity settings, and the way campaign finance pressures strengthen leadership control over nominations and strategy.The Congress is treated as the clearest case, with the post-1969 trajectory read as a shift toward plebiscitary electoral strategy and organisational de-institutionalisation. The BJP is portrayed as cohesive and highly organised, anchored ideologically and supported by an extra-party cadre structure, which brings discipline but also constrains openness. The “Janata family” parties are shown as organisationally fragile, with unity problems driven by caste hierarchy within states and poor aggregation across states. Regional and Left parties are described as top-down on nominations and finance even when cadre strength is real. The normative payoff is carefully handled. The essay rejects American-style primaries as an abuse-prone transplant in India’s regulatory environment, and instead argues for reforms that are both more modest and more plausible, verifiable membership, internal elections starting at district and state levels, and a reduction in excessive centralisation, with state funding discussed as a possible lever for accountability. The deeper point is that the mechanism for accommodating diversity shifted from umbrella-party internal bargaining to a politics of presence managed through coalitions. That shift does not automatically deepen democracy, and, in the absence of robust internal competition, can intensify factionalism and splintering.Electoral system reform, presented as a trade-off rather than a cureThe third essay asks whether India should move from first-past-the-post to proportional representation in the post-1989 era of sharper identity mobilisation and heightened majority–minority anxieties. I was reminded of earlier discussions on political reform with colleagues, where we concluded that, notwithstanding its many limitations, the first-past-the-post system compels political actors to coordinate and form alliances, thereby disincentivising siloed action. This insight resurfaced while working with Professor Rajeev Gowda in his New Delhi office, incidentally a peer and colleague of Sridharan from their UPenn days. Sridharan’s tone is appropriately cautious. PR is attractive for its fidelity in translating votes into seats and for its tendency to produce coalition governments that must bargain. Yet the essay also makes clear that proportionality can lower effective thresholds and potentially amplify fragmentation, splits, and unstable coalition governance, especially in a party system already prone to factionalism. The discussion is technically literate without becoming technocratic, walking through PR variants and mixed-member alternatives, including a compensatory component as a middle path. The most persuasive sections are those that connect institutional design to the lived experience of insecurity among dispersed minorities. At the same time, the essay insists that PR alone is not a clean fix without stronger rights-based protections and clearer recognition of group and cultural rights. That insistence is important because it pulls the debate away from electoral engineering as salvation and back toward the constitutional and political foundations of accommodation.Coalition politics after 2014, relocated rather than eliminatedThe later essay on whether 2014 marked the end of coalition politics makes a clear case that coalitions did not vanish with a single-party Lok Sabha majority. Instead, coalition-making moved “upstream” into the pre-electoral phase, where seat-sharing, vote-pooling, and alliance signalling shape constituency outcomes under plurality rules. By alliance signalling, the author means the public and organisational messaging that tells voters and party workers who is allied with whom, who is contesting which seat, and where supporters should transfer their vote so anti-incumbent or anti-rival votes are not split. The author’s point is not only that allies add seats, but that alliances can be the difference between a narrow plurality and a decisive seat conversion in competitive state-level arenas. This reframes coalitions as an electoral technology, not merely a post-election compulsion. The essay also draws attention to the “stickiness” of coalition bargains: once parties settle on a seat-sharing arrangement and build vote-transfer expectations on the ground, they tend to carry the broad terms of that deal into the next election, adjusting at the margins unless there is a major shift in leverage. Alongside the continuing relevance of regional partners for governability and the Rajya Sabha constraint on major legislative ambitions, this reinforces a larger claim running through Part I: India’s competition remains structurally multi-party, and apparent majorities often rest on strategically constructed coalitional foundations and compromises that the partners are willing to make.Governance diffusion and performance legitimacyThe essay on cross-state learning shifts the focus from electoral competition to policy diffusion and state capacity. It argues that electoral incentives have increasingly leaned toward performance legitimacy, making visible improvements in service delivery politically valuable. The “so what” is that Indian federalism starts to function not only as a site of diversity, but as a competitive laboratory: chief ministers and senior bureaucracies can win credibility by demonstrating measurable delivery, and they can also incur political costs if they are seen as lagging behind peer states on salient services.The book’s typology of diffusion, and its emphasis that successful borrowing is adaptation rather than copy-paste replication, reads as a practical framework for students of federalism and administrative reform. This matters because diffusion changes the strategic baseline. Once a reform is proven elsewhere, it becomes harder for incumbents to claim novelty or deny feasibility, and oppositions can credibly campaign on “If State X can do it, why not us?” The focus on enabling conditions, easily amendable legal templates and replicable ICT packages, is a useful specification of why some reforms travel quickly while others remain partial due to intermediaries and vested interests. In concrete terms, reforms are most portable when they can be modularised into (a) a standard legal/administrative order that can be tweaked without reopening major political conflicts, and (b) a technology stack that can be rolled out with limited local discretion. By contrast, reforms that threaten entrenched rents, such as procurement channels, discretionary licensing, or local patronage networks, diffuse more slowly or get “implemented” in name while being diluted through selective compliance, contractor capture, or bureaucratic foot-dragging.Middle-class growth, and the discipline of scaleThe final essay in Part I, on the growth and composition of India’s middle class and its political implications for liberalisation, is effective precisely because it refuses a romantic story of a unified pro-market constituency. Sridharan argues that middle-class politics depends less on abstract ideology and more on whether households benefit from state-mediated employment and subsidies. The analysis of public sector employment and subsidy-linked households complicates easy assumptions about reform coalitions, and supports the conclusion that India’s post-1991 trajectory is best understood as sustained gradualism, deregulation is feasible, deeper restructuring is politically costly.Importantly, the essay keeps the scale of this shift in perspective. Even a “broad middle class” of roughly 250 million (or somewhat more, depending on assumptions) exists within a country of well over a billion people, leaving the majority outside that category. The book makes this point clearly, and it matters, because it prevents readers from mistaking a significant demographic expansion for a universal social transformation. It also anchors the distributive and representational questions that run through Part I, coexistence and justice require attention to who remains structurally excluded from the material bases of voice and influence.In sum, Part I’s principal strength is its commitment to explaining rather than declaring. Across essays, Sridharan repeatedly foregrounds mechanisms, electoral incentives, organisational capacity, strategic coordination, and the political economy of mobilisation. The result is a set of arguments that can productively be disagreed with, but cannot easily be dismissed. If the compilation has a civic purpose, it is this: to pull readers back toward analytical conversation, toward understanding why India’s democratic contestation looks the way it does, and toward reform debates that take trade-offs seriously rather than treating institutional change as either betrayal or magic. For students and scholars of Indian politics, this is a valuable collection not only for its substantive claims, but also for its method. It demonstrates how to work from theory to evidence and back again, how to separate diagnosis from prescription, and how to discuss identity, institutions, and distribution without collapsing into polemic. In a climate where many public arguments are designed to win rather than to illuminate, that is a contribution in itself.Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden and a research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London.