HISTORY

Political Systems Project was launched in the immediate aftermath of the 2025 Bihar Assembly election results. Any honest view of the situation would call this election and its results a farce. But still, many dedicated progressive, centrist, and leftist voices rushed to blame the opposition for its alleged failure to have winning election strategies. Despite India’s rich and long history of people’s movements, it would seem that no solution to the present conundrum is forthcoming from the country’s civil society.

What the situation urgently demands is not election strategies, but strategies on how to re-establish a robust election process in a country that has unquestionably become like Russia in that elections happen only as a meaningless ritual, with the outcome being pre-decided. After the 2024 Lok Sabha election results, the regime seems hell-bent on not allowing any free and fair elections to take place.

In a strange upending of historical trends, while the civil society of the country seems obstinately reluctant to own up to their own failures, the progressive political class – staring at its own impending annihilation – is scrounging around for ways to save Indian democracy.

The time then seems ripe for wide-ranging reforms within progressive political forces and political systems at large. In a country with an awe-inspiring and ancient tradition of social, economic, legal, constitutional, and religious reforms, such a political reformation is not as difficult as the abysmal state of affairs may make it seem.

It is against this backdrop and with these principles that Political Systems Project was founded to foil the palpable and nefarious plans of right wing forces to murder Indian democracy.