This is a project on how parties internally negotiate and decide on nominations for elections is being undertaken by intensive interviews with key players in both major and other parties in the 2009 elections, and extended backward as far as possible using available data, for five major political parties. This again is an unresearched subject since the early work on Indian political science in the 1960s and 1970s. An early version was presented at a conference on parties and elections in the United States, Canada and India, three federal democracies using the first-past-the-post electoral system, held at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2011.