Abstract
Political parties that cater primarily to the interests of the elite voters can face conflicting objectives of retaining the support of their elite constituents, while also reaching out to poorer voters in order to gain power. In this well-written book, Tariq Thachil examines how India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), often identified as a Hindu nationalist party catering to the privileged upper castes, improved its vote share (from 15% in 1996 to 22% in the 2004 national elections) among the least advantaged social groups: Dalits and Adivasis.
Thachil argues that conventional explanations of redistributive programmatic shifts, patronage and sociocultural appeals are unable to explain the BJP’s success. Instead, rudimentary local services (mainly education and medical) provided privately through its affiliate organizations helped the BJP to appeal to poor voters at a relatively low cost. A service-based approach was attractive because it was less threatening to the BJP’s elite core than alternative approaches based on redistributive shifts in policies or patronage. The role of private service in explaining the BJP’s success has been highlighted previously (see, e.g. Yadav, 2004), but Thachil conceptualizes service as a distinct electoral strategy for elite parties, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the BJP’s use of private service to win support of poor voters.
Thachil develops a simple, yet powerful framework that explains the affinity between the BJP and a service-based strategy to be the joint product of two factors: demand (as an elite party) for a non-threatening strategy of poor voter recruitment and supply (as a party founded by a social movement) of thick organizational resources. In Chapter 2, Thachil argues that the rise of Hindu nationalism during the 1980s and 1990s did not help the BJP to appeal to poor voters, and its image as an elite upper caste party endured well into the 1990s. By 2004, however, the BJP was able to improve its vote share among Dalits and Adivasis in many Indian states. Chapter 3 presents an insightful finding based on an analysis of the 2004 national election survey that the membership of non-party organizations among the BJP’s non-elite voters was the key reason for the party’s support from these voters. Building upon this finding, Chapter 4 establishes a strong correlation between the density of BJP-affiliated service organizations and the percentage of Dalits and Adivasis voting for the BJP in the 2004 national election.
A second set of arguments made in the book explains the translation of service into votes for the BJP as a complex social process rather than being an exchange based on electoral reciprocity or clientelism. Based on his extensive fieldwork in the state of Chhattisgarh, Thachil demonstrates in Chapter 5 the considerable impact of private service on the political choice of beneficiaries as well as on the broader communities where the service was provided.
Explanations about when private service as an electoral strategy is likely to succeed are presented in Chapter 6 using case studies of two Indian states: Kerala and Uttar Pradesh (UP). In Kerala, the BJP’s lack of success in winning poor voters’ support through a private service strategy is attributed to the strength of basic government provisioning and a high degree of internal mobilization of the lower castes by a rival party. In UP, the provision of private service failed to win votes for the BJP despite an inadequate public service provisioning because the lower castes had already been horizontally mobilized by a rival ethnic party. Thachil finds that two features of rival parties’ strategies heavily influence the electoral efficacy of private service or welfare: service provision can prove electorally successful where rival parties appeal to the poor through a vertical mobilization strategy or non-programmatic linkages with poor voters.
To put his argument in a comparative perspective, Thachil compares the BJP’s experience of using private service with that of Islamist parties inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Yemen and Indonesia. He illustrates in Chapter 7 that the BJP’s experience can help understand more generally why elite parties might follow a service-based approach for electoral gains, and how successful such a strategy is likely to be. While presenting his overall conclusions, Thachil highlights two types of challenges of sustaining the success of private service as an electoral strategy: those resulting from internal tensions within an elite party and its affiliates and those arising from major changes in the external environment in which service activists work.
The main strength of this book is its rigorous empirical analysis and a research design that combines extensive qualitative fieldwork in selected Indian states, with quantitative analyses of national and local survey data. I found the comparative analysis of the Islamic parties’ use of service provision to win votes to be especially illuminating.
This book does not have any major flaw, but I have few comments on Thachil’s definition of the ‘poor’ and the data used. Firstly, most of the empirical analysis equates poor voters in India with Dalit and Adivasi communities. This may hold true to a large extent, but there is also a sizeable non-Dalit, non-Adivasi (including Muslim) poor population in India which is not explicitly included in the empirical analysis. Secondly, Dalits and Adivasis have been treated as a single social grouping, whereas they may not share the same socio-economic characteristics or political views. Differentiating between these two groups in the empirical analysis might have provided further insights into Thachil’s arguments. Lastly, the national election survey data used in the book exclude smaller Indian states, including many north-eastern states. Since these states have a high concentration of Adivasi population, their inclusion in the data would have made the analysis more robust. These observations, however, do not take away from the overall scholarship of the book.
This book will encourage further research to understand if private service will continue to be an important electoral strategy for the BJP, especially in the light of its major success in the 2014 national election. It also provides avenues for further comparative research on private service as an actual or potential electoral strategy for elite parties. Insightful and well researched, Thachil’s work should be of interest to anyone who is interested in electoral competition and voter behaviour, political parties or Indian politics.