Who is behind this
About LokDisha
LokDisha — also written Lok Disha; लोकदिशा, “the people’s direction” — is a free Indian political compass test at lokdisha.org. It maps where you stand across seven dimensions of Indian politics and shows which parties and leaders sit nearest to your answers, with the evidence for every placement shown on the page.
What LokDisha is, and the name
LokDisha is a political self-portrait tool built specifically for India. Instead of the two Western axes of the classic political compass, it measures seven that Indian politics actually argues along — welfare, markets, caste recognition, nationhood, state authority, culture, and the balance between the Union and the states — and gives you a reading on each, not one label.
The name is Hindi: lok, the people; disha, direction. लोकदिशा — the direction the people are facing. It is a description of what the instrument measures, not a slogan.
Who built it, and why
LokDisha was built by Lakshya Shastri, an independent builder, and great-grandchild of Lal Bahadur Shastri, India’s second Prime Minister. It is a personal project, not a company, a party organ, or a research institute.
It exists because every political compass Indians could take was built for somebody else’s politics. Caste, the shape of the nation, and the Centre–state question do not appear on a left–right grid, so an Indian taking those tests was being measured on questions that were not theirs and left unmeasured on the ones that were. LokDisha asks the Indian questions.
How it works, in brief
The full test is 53 real policy trade-offs — MSP, reservations, a Uniform Civil Code, internet shutdowns, delimitation — each with five positions running from one pole of an axis to the other, and an honest “not familiar enough to say” that drops the question rather than guessing for you. A quick version of 32 questions takes about six minutes.
Scores are computed on our servers, from −10 to +10 on each axis. Nine Indian parties and dozens of current and historical leaders are placed on the same seven scales from their public record — manifestos, legislation, votes, speeches — and the evidence behind every placement is printed beside it. The long answer on why India needed its own compass, and how the seven axes were chosen, is at /indian-political-compass.
Independence and neutrality
LokDisha has no party affiliation and takes no position on how anyone should vote. It shows proximity — which parties sit nearest your answers on each axis — never a recommendation, and never a match percentage.
It is free, carries no advertising, and needs no account: no name, email, or phone number is ever asked for. Figures are placed on what they have said and done, with both sides of each record shown, and the same rules apply to every party and every leader.
Not to be confused with
LokDisha is unrelated to the Indian government’s DISHA committees — the District Development Coordination and Monitoring Committees that oversee central schemes — and to the Disha Foundation, a non-governmental organisation. They share part of a name and nothing else. LokDisha is the political compass test at lokdisha.org.
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Why an Indian political compass?