Book Review: Mukulika Banerjee. Why India Votes?

India’s democratic institutions have been pilloried in recent years. All available surveys probing the esteem in which citizens hold their elected representatives and political parties reveal how critical Indians are of their political class. Yet participation in elections has never been so high. The recent 2014 general elections saw a record 68 per cent turnout, more than most European democracies with similar non-obligatory voting systems. Women’s turnout—significantly lower than men’s for a long time—is now at least at par in most states. There are few examples of countries where a growing disenchantment with politics and the rejection of politicians go hand in hand with greater participation in the democratic process. This puzzle is what makes this book a timely and important contribution. The literature on electoral politics in India essentially focuses on explaining for whom people vote and why and not on why people vote in the first place and whether the reasons pushing people to turn out on the election day have anything to do with electoral competition and party politics.

The second important and original contribution of the book is its methodology. An anthropologist, Banerjee avoids some of the common limitations and traps of her discipline—localism, resistance to comparison—by combining several methods: ethnographic, comparative and quantitative. The methodology debate, opposing quantitative and qualitative methods, often leads to sterile parochial confrontations or to celebratory yet unspecified calls for methodological unity. ‘Why India votes?’ for once gives the convincing demonstration that not only can varied methods coexist within the framework of particular research but that they can actually produce an outcome larger than their individual contributions, mutually enriching the material collected and its analysis.

The author and her team of researchers have used an ethnographic method in 12 locations across India, covering 11 states and combining rural, urban and semi-urban settings. They have not only probed voters’ opinions and views on the act of voting itself but have also observed in detail voters’ practices as well as the materiality of the electoral process—from the campaign to the polling itself, paying attention to the minute material details behind the organization of polling booths and the role of the Election Commission. They have also paid attention to the language used by respondents and analyzed it in a dedicated chapter, providing insights on the vernacular registers of politics that no survey could capture.

The material collected in the various sites is then collated and analyzed in four chapters, providing the reader with composite answers to the many dimensions of the act of voting: voting as an act of citizenship, as a social practice, as an assertion of egalitarian aspirations and as the expression of an individual right. The result is a convincing argument that the act of voting is before all an end in itself, that what drives people to the polling booth is not simply the expected outcome of the vote as a collective practice or the pressures to assert one’s group’s identity, but the attachment to what constitutes a rare and concrete experience of political equality, in a society marked by deeply entrenched inequalities. Another merit of the book is to remind the reader that the success of India’s democracy lies more in the attachment that people feel for democratic participation, than as an outcome of electoral competition and party politics. Those who have wondered why and how the often sad spectacle of party politics in India and the murky practices attached to it could generate such popular enthusiasm will find their answers in this book.

The approach adopted by Banerjee is not, however, without risks. Some may consider the corpus of evidence assembled to be largely anecdotal. Quantitativists may have issues with the way the study’s locations have been selected. There may be ground for such caveats, but the quality of the findings and of the arguments largely outweighs these discipline-based methodological objections. The serious issue that one can raise is that by focusing on individual voters, the study leaves aside the correlation of political practices and the analysis of the local political, social and economic contexts. The question of how context affects individuals’ views on the electoral process itself remains unaddressed. The annexes provide contextual information about the study’s locations, notably on the local demography and the 2009 campaign. There was an opportunity here to probe deeper into local political histories or, at least, give a more detailed account of it.

While the book provides sound arguments on why people vote in large numbers, it does not really account for turnout variations. As such, no matter how convincing they are, the main arguments seem independent of temporal as well as socio-political context. Another critique is that the focus of the study remains confined to the realm of the visible, overlooking some of the darker aspects of electoral politics: disenfranchisement of poor urban voters and minority voters, illegal underground campaigning activities and the serious limitations of the Election Commission’s capacity to effectively control these illegal activities. The result is a rather enchanted vision of electoral democracy—from the voter/citizen’s viewpoint—downplaying some of the darker realities of electoral politics in India.

That being said, the book provides in its introduction and in the last two chapters insights that should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the fate and workings of India’s democracy or to anyone teaching social sciences methodology seminars. It is worth noting that many single-authored books are the product of vast collaborative efforts, but too often research assistants and other collaborators find themselves relegated to a generic thank-you note in the acknowledgements section. In this case, the presence of useful annexes and copious endnote references to Banerjee’s co-fieldworkers provide them due credit, giving the reader at the same time a precise idea of everyone’s contribution.