Abstract
The edited volume under review, comprising twenty-three chapters in six parts apart from Introduction, an outcome of NES survey data, is an important addition to the election studies literature coming from the CSDS-Lokniti network members. The six parts consist of (a) national perspective, (b) northern states, (c) central states/‘bridge’ states, (d) eastern states, (e) southern states and (f) northeastern states. The chapters in this edited volume, both state-specific and general in nature, examine larger political questions of long-term implications of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The edited volume not only focusses on an all-India larger picture taking up important electoral themes for macroanalysis but also includes state-specific chapters.
Rahul Verma and Sanjay Kumar in this edited volume argue that the magnitude of the BJP’s victory in 2014 and its social and geographical expansion signals a critical realignment in India’s electoral politics and the possibility of the emergence of the BJP as the ‘system-defining party’ (p. 37). Continuing to dissect the electoral mandate going the BJP way, especially in the Hindi-speaking states, Shreyas Sardesai and Pranav Gupta argue that there is a need to consider the role played by religion and religious cleavage, populist narratives on development, corruption and leadership coupled with deplorable performance of the Congress in determining the electoral outcome (p. 71). Dwelling upon the appalling performance of the Congress, Rekha Saxena refers to the outrage against the corruption in high places under the Congress-led UPA-II regime along with the US presidential-like campaign run by Narendra Modi as important factors contributing to the Congress debacle (p. 92). Suraj Jacob delineates three-fold categorisation (national, mesonational and subnational) to examine two broad perspectives on party systems. One, the sociological strand argues that major socioeconomic cleavages manifest in support for distinct parties. Two, the institutional or ‘political-systemic’ strand argues that specific institutional features such as electoral rules create incentives for political forces to converge or diverge as parties (p. 115).
Sifting through the state-specific chapters, it occurs that despite the state-specific nature of electoral politics and the emergence of distinct ‘newer’ identities, there are certain commonalities across the states that have emerged in the past 30 years or so, even as the differences have grown (p. 19). First, the common feature is the development of historical–cultural regions into electoral regions has their specificities. The specificities are reflected not only in terms of electoral concerns but also in terms of the electoral presence of parties. Second, elections in recent India, including the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and the post-2014 assembly elections, have been witness to the rise of new and newer social groups and also the emergence of smaller substate parties having their support and the state-level political leadership across the parties, mainly belonging to the numerically strong middle and poor peasant caste groups. Third, a significant development of the post-Congress dominance phase, visible across the segmented Indian polity, has been the dissociation or differentiation of the national and state party systems in India with significant electoral and federal consequences in terms of institutional functioning. Fourth, a study of state-level electoral verdicts in this edited volume and other relevant election studies literature confirms the ongoing federalisation of polity (p. 20). It is visible not only in the form of the same party adopting a different set of electoral strategy and raising state-specific electoral issues as viewed in the state-specific questions included in the NES’s 2014 questionnaire but also reflected in the organisation of parties across the ideological spectrums. Fifth, the 2014 Lok Sabha election draws our attention to the resurgence of another general trend in the form of the significance of the political leadership in determining electoral choices, a theme that has remained understudied in the literature on elections.
As Kumar (p. 22) points out that while the focus on the state as the unit for election studies has definitely been an advancement in the field, the need is to have greater focus on the substate electoral regions, constructed through a historical political process within them. As these substate regions emerge gradually as distinct electoral regions, there is a greater need to pay attention to their own specificities in terms of their electoral issues and electoral choices in a comparative mode, rather than masking them in pursuit of presenting the state as a homogeneous electoral space. There is also a greater need to not only move within but also beyond a particular state. There is a critical need to undertake cross-state/intra-state studies of electoral politics.
The results of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections undermine the quintessence of an assemblage of dissenting voices over the kinds of alternative worlds we want to create. Crisis manifestations are felt across all domains, be it social, economic, political, cultural, ethical, environmental, spiritual and so on. Such phenomena have undercut the normatively ordained institutional imperatives of heterogeneity, plurality and multiculturalism. And, in this context, this edited volume is an important addition to the election studies literature in India.