Number Theory: Not a mandated post, but the trend of appointing deputy CMs records a rise

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India currently has 28 states and three union territories (UTs) with a state legislature. Before the imposition of President’s Rule in Manipur, there were 31 chief ministers and 26 deputy chief ministers in the country.

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The post of a deputy chief minister is not constitutionally mandated unlike the council of ministers and appointing one is a purely political decision to create one or more than one second among equals (the first being the chief minister) in the state executive.

Has the trend of appointing deputy chief ministers become stronger over the years?

Are deputy chief ministers more likely in alliance governments ?

Are some parties more likely to appoint deputy chief ministers than others?

Is balancing caste calculus the basic motive behind appointing a deputy chief minister?

To answer these questions, HT built a dataset of all deputy chief ministers in India since 1952. This database has been prepared by using various sources including official and unofficial information on the internet. The latter has been cross-verified from multiple sources to maintain accuracy. This is the third comprehensive database prepared by HT’s data journalism team; the first and second were a database of India’s chief ministers and the Council of Ministers of the union government. The deputy chief minister database, like the other two databases, tracks people over a time continuum.

This three-part data journalism series will present summary findings from this dataset to answer the questions framed above. The first part of this series will look at the number of deputy chief ministers over time in the country. The second part of the series will look at state-wise trends in appointment of deputy chief ministers and the final part will discuss party-wise and caste-wise trends.

Not a mandated post, but the trend of appointing deputy CMs records a rise

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  The absolute and relative number of deputy chief ministers is the highest today

  There are currently 26 deputy chief ministers in India. This is the highest this number has been since 20 May 1952, the date on which HT’s deputy chief minister database begins. This date is when government formation started after the first general elections – national and state elections were held simultaneously – in India. A longer-term look at the data shows that the number of deputy chief ministers was the lowest in 1950s, saw a spike from the late-1960s (which is when state politics became more competitive at the cost of the Congress), peaked in the mid-1990s before a lull and then saw a sharp spike in the post-2014 period. What is remarkable about the rise in number of deputy chief ministers in the post-2014 period is the fact that it has come in an era of the emergence of a new national political hegemon, namely, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rather than during a period of fragmented or coalition-dominated politics such as the late-1906s or the 1990s. To be sure, one could argue that the rise in the number of deputy chief ministers in the dataset is just a reflection of the creation of more legislative assemblies; the number has increased from 21 in 1952 to 31 today (It first fell to 13 by 1956 as a result of reorganisation of states on linguistic basis). To check for this potential bias, HT has looked at the number of deputy chief ministers per chief minister at a given point in time by comparing its database of chief ministers and deputy chief ministers. The trend is almost similar to the one in absolute number of deputy chief ministers. We have more deputy chief ministers per chief minister than at any other point in time today.
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  There is often more than one deputy chief minister in a state

  India’s current 26 deputy chief ministers come from only 17 states. This means that some states have more than one deputy chief minister right now. How common is this practice? An analysis of HT’s database shows that 44% of the total 190 deputy chief ministers so far were in the same state government at the same time. The record for the highest number of deputy chief ministers in state at a given point of time is with Andhra Pradesh which had 5 deputy chief ministers between June 2019 and April 2022. Currently, nine Indian states have more than one deputy chief minister.