Book Review: Paul Wallace (ed.),India’s 2014 Elections: A Modi-led BJP Sweep

India’s 2014 Elections: A Modi-led BJP Sweep is the fifth book in a series that aims to explain the verdicts of parliamentary elections in India. Paul Wallace and Ramashray Roy had co-edited the first four volumes of this series, beginning in 1998. The book brings together academicians from across the country and seeks to provide a holistic understanding of what led to Narendra Modi led Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) emphatic victory. It has been divided into two parts—thematic studies of broader themes related to the election, and 12 state studies. The BJP’s victory in 2014 has some common elements from both the 1977 and the 1984 Lok Sabha elections. Despite no united opposition, there was a strong anti-incumbency sentiment against the Congress similar to 1977. Like 1984, most states in north and western India probably witnessed what Paul Brass calls—‘lamppost election’. The BJP gradually gained support since 2013 onwards and kept increasing its lead over the Congress. Thus, rather than merely identifying a few pre-election incidents and factors, one must be able to elucidate how this entire process unravelled on the ground if he/she wants to explain how the BJP won such a massive majority.

The first part of the book, apart from the broad introduction by the editor, consists of thematic studies with a narrow scope, covering essentially only four themes—the role of regional parties, the impact of Modi’s leadership, gender and the role of civil society. The introduction provides an overview of the BJP’s victory and discusses three major factors that led to the party’s victory—economy, corruption and the leadership-centric campaign of the BJP (p. 10). While Wallace correctly identifies ‘price rise’ as the main concern of the people, he seems to have ignored the direct and indirect impact of poor macroeconomic performance, not considering other indicators, such as economic growth and infrastructure development. Also, one would have expected a more detailed discussion of the future of the Congress party, on whether it would be able to rebuild its social coalition and prevent itself from a terminal decline.

In their chapter entitled ‘Resistance to Regionalism’, Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers identify larger changes in the country’s party system that emerge from the 2014 result. They explain how the regional concentration of the BJP’s support and the dominance of regional parties in many states might prevent it from recreating a Congress-like hegemony in Indian politics. Their argument about the emergence of a class-based mobilization among caste groups should stimulate further research, as it could help in gauging whether class is becoming relatively more important than other social identities.

Walter Andersen’s chapter on the BJP provides a comprehensive account of Narendra Modi’s rise in national politics. It provides a detailed report about the individual-centric nature of the BJP’s campaign. The chapter by Jyotindra Dasgupta and Anshu N. Chatterjee, on the role of civic organizations, deviates from focusing on the 2014 election and has detailed information about organizations and movements, such as Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Sangathan (MKSS) and the Right to Information movement. The discussion on the Anna Hazare movement again is extremely descriptive and focuses on the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). One would have expected the section on corruption in this chapter to elucidate how the perception of widespread corruption was built and how the large scams harmed the Congress’s electoral prospects. Overall, this part of the book could have covered a wider set of themes, for instance, the role of social cleavages, media and the impact of young voters.

The second part of the book has analyses of most states of the country. Scholars from across India have written about the election verdict in their respective states. There is no methodological rigidity in the articles: most authors use a combination of methods—qualitative/ethnographic evidence and survey data to explain the findings from the aggregate data. In many articles, authors commit basic mistakes in data presentation and interpretation. In the Uttar Pradesh chapter, for example, Sudha Pai and Avinash Kumar use data on the absolute number of votes to compare the Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) performance. These data are incomparable as a change in the number of votes could be simply due to higher registration or cleaning of electoral rolls (p. 128). In the chapter on Jammu and Kashmir, Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay and Mohita Bhatia argue that increase in turnout in Hindu majority constituencies helped the BJP, along with communal polarization. They claim, without giving empirical evidence or a source, that Hindu turnout was higher than Muslim turnout in Udhampur (p. 246). In her chapter on the gender narrative in Part One, Renuka Daigar does not provide any information on the criteria used to classify a candidate under family background or elite stature along with the data on the gender-wise background profile of elected candidates (pp. 76–79). Also, it would have been better if the authors had divided some tables which run into multiple pages into shorter individual tables. This would have made it simpler for the reader to compare various categories and interpret the data.

Some chapters provide detailed accounts of the BJP’s campaign strategies in a particular state. These give the reader an insight into how the party’s campaign unfolded on the ground among the voters. But there seems to be a major problem as the authors fail to review the independent impact of multiple strategies followed by the BJP. It is highly unlikely that all strategies followed by the BJP would have worked; thus, it is relevant to understand what worked relatively better and what failed completely.

Finally, some state chapters have lengthy descriptive sections providing background information and historical accounts of issues and conflicts. They shift the focus away from the central theme of the book—the verdict of the 2014 Election. For instance, in the chapter on Andhra Pradesh, Karli Srinivasulu describes the complete process of the formation of Telangana (pp. 342–346). The Jammu and Kashmir chapter explains the historical political context and legal and constitutional provisions related to Kashmir (pp. 235–241). In the Delhi chapter, the authors describe the electoral history of each seat (pp. 165–177), even though there have been major changes in the constituencies’ profile post the 2008 delimitation. Most of these factors are indeed important in state politics, but they could have been mentioned briefly in the text. These problems are essentially linked to the absence of a uniform structure for the state articles, which leads to a disproportionate focus on certain sections, and varying lengths. Most articles provide adequate information about what happened in 2014 but many fail to provide adequate empirical evidence for explaining factors behind the results.

Nonetheless, as a rich source of information on voting patterns, and electoral campaigns, this book is an important addition to the academic literature on this Lok Sabha election.