Political parties have emerged as the most distinctive feature of the process of political representation. They constitute indispensable devices of democratic politics for contemporary systems of representative governments. Most significantly, they form the link between the government and the people. The growing complexities of administration and governance of modern times accentuated the demand for a system in which people can choose those whom they can saddle with this enormous responsibility of representing them. The range of tasks parties perform make them central to all kinds of polities. Political parties stand for the act of representation with an electoral system and process of recruitment of its leaders, defining the goals and resolving conflicts within the internal system (Eldersveld, 1964, p.1). They create the organizational base for mobilization and facilitate political participation. People identify themselves with the parties in terms of ideologies, beliefs, and symbols as projected by them. In India, political parties are viewed as an integral part of our democracy. It is hard to conceive of India’s democratic system and its success without the crucial role played by parties (Hasan, 2010: 241). Political parties are not directly mentioned in the Constitution of India. The Tenth Schedule added by the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act, 1985 first mentions them in India in a specific context of defection.1 This chapter aims at exploring the functioning of  party system in India with reference to its transformation from dominant party system to its disintegration to an incoherent multiparty system to the present two-coalition multiparty system. Three major ideological influences seem to have been critical in Indian politics: colonialism, nationalism and democracy. The colonial, nationalist and democratic articulation of ‘the political’ remains therefore crucial in comprehending Indian politics even after decolonization. Two points need to be kept in mind. First, although colonialism and nationalism are surely antagonistic to each other there is no doubt that the former provoked circumstances in which nationalism emerged as a powerful ideology to articulate the voices of the colonized. Second, colonialism also led to a slow process of democratization by gradually involving people who were favourably disposed towards the alien administration.