Many Indian species have descended from those of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent from which India separated more than 100 million years ago. India’s subsequent collision with Eurasia set off a mass exchange of species. However, volcanism and climatic changes later caused the extinction of many endemic Indian forms. Still later, mammals entered India from Asia through two zoogeographic passes flanking the Himalayas.
India contains 172 IUCN-designated threatened animal species, or 2.9% of endangered forms. Before they were extensively used for agriculture and cleared for human settlement, the thorn forests of Punjab were mingled at intervals with open grasslands that were grazed by large herds of blackbuck preyed on by the Asiatic cheetah; the blackbuck, no longer extant in Punjab, is now severely endangered in India, and the cheetah is extinct. The pervasive and ecologically devastating human encroachment of recent decades has critically endangered Indian wildlife. In response, the system of national parks and protected areas, first established in 1935, was expanded substantially.
Government and politics
India is a parliamentary republic with a multi-party system. It has six recognized national parties, including the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and over 50 regional parties. Congress is considered the ideological center in Indian political culture, whereas the BJP is right-wing to far-right. From 1950 to the late 1980s, Congress held a majority in India’s parliament. Afterwards, it increasingly shared power with the BJP, as well as with powerful regional parties, which forced multi-party coalition governments at the center.
In the general elections in 1951, 1957, and 1962, Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, won easy victories. On Nehru’s death in 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri briefly became prime minister; he was succeeded in 1966, by Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, who led the Congress to election victories in 1967 and 1971. Following public discontent with the state of emergency Indira Gandhi had declared in 1975, Congress was voted out of power in 1977. After Congress was returned to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi was assassinated and succeeded by Rajiv Gandhi, who won comfortably in the elections later that year. A National Front coalition led by the Janata Dal in alliance with the Left Front won the 1989 elections, with the subsequent government lasting just under two years, and V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar serving as prime ministers.In the 1991 Indian general election, Congress, as the largest single party, formed a minority government led by P. V. Narasimha Rao.
