Both countries have a Prime Minister who leads a Government answerable to a directly elected lower house, and a ceremonial President. In Ireland, that Prime Minister is the Taoiseach and the lower house is Dáil Éireann.

Ireland is a unitary state with no federal states, and its parliament is far smaller. The Dáil has 174 TDs; the Lok Sabha has 543 members.

One rule explains most of Irish politics: the Government exists only while it has the support of a majority in the Dáil. Voters elect TDs; TDs choose the Taoiseach; the Taoiseach picks Ministers who run the departments. If the Dáil withdraws its confidence, the Government falls.

The President sits outside that chain. The office is directly elected and politically neutral, which is why a popular President can be from a different tradition to the Government of the day.

The Irish President is elected directly by voters for seven years. In India the President is chosen by an electoral college. The Irish President is head of State with limited powers: signing Bills into law, referring Bills to the Supreme Court and holding a few reserve powers.

A President can serve at most two terms. Candidates need the backing of 20 Oireachtas members or four local councils, which is why presidential elections usually have only a handful of candidates.

Both are upper houses with indirectly elected members and some nominees. The Seanad has 60 members, 11 of whom are nominated by the Taoiseach. Like the Rajya Sabha it cannot block money Bills, and it can delay other Bills but not veto them.

Ireland uses proportional representation with the single transferable vote in 43 constituencies. Each elects three, four or five TDs. Voters rank candidates in order of preference. That produces coalition governments, such as the current one of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and independents.

Ballots are paper, marked with a pencil and counted by hand. There are no electronic voting machines.

Every resident of Ireland aged 18 or over can vote in local elections, regardless of nationality. Only Irish and British citizens can vote in Dáil elections, and EU citizens can vote in European elections. To vote in Dáil elections, you need Irish citizenship, which is available after a period of reckonable residence.

Indian nationals are now one of the larger non-Irish groups in the country. At the 2022 census there were 56,642 Indian citizens in Ireland.

Irish politics uses Irish-language titles even in English-language news. Nobody translates them, so it helps to know the handful that come up every day.

Everything the Oireachtas does is published: every vote, every speech and every answer to a parliamentary question. The hard part is finding what matters in hundreds of pages of transcripts.