Since political parties have grown in most democracies outside the framework of constitutions, the makers of the Indian Constitution did not pay any attention to structures of parties and party system. This was perhaps so because the health of the Indian National Congress, the dominant political party in the Constituent Assembly and the provisional Parliament (both overlapping with each other) then, did not ring any alarm bells. Even Dr. B.R Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution, whose own party, Scheduled Castes Federation of India, was in an anaemic state, did not show any concern on this account. In his last address to the Constituent Assembly he expressed a great satisfaction with the emergent text of the Constitution and mentioned a few preconditions for its prospective success such as social equality to supplement political equality, a functional bureaucracy, and quality of persons working it; he did not refer to the factor of a good party system in this context (GoI, Constituent Assembly Debates, 2003: 972-981). Over the decades since then, especially in the post-Nehru era, the absence of a wholesome party system has loomed large as the Achilles heel of Indian democracy. In the Nehru era and under his early successors (Lal Bahadur Shastri and early Indira Gandhi) intra-party, inter-party, and intergovernmental relations remained fairly democratic, pluralist, and federal. Since the 1969 Congress split and political ascendance of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1971 Lok Sabha election, there has been a precipitous decline of intra-party democracy in the ruling party, inter-party relations, and qualify of parliamentary-federal governments as well as governance.