India. Craig Jeffrey
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practical problems of implementing the registration of all adults who would be citizens, as voters’ (2018: 252). She explains how the process of operationalizing democracy helped to constitute citizenship, concluding her book with an extended quote from the papers of B. Shiva Rao, who contested one of the parliamentary seats in what was then Madras:
I did not think the untouchables in the rural areas would attach any great importance to the vote. There again I was in serious error. I visited dozens of polling booths all over the constituency on voting day and found in every queue, whether of men or women voters, untouchables in considerable numbers … The experience of standing in the same queue with one’s employer, and the consciousness of having the same political right as the high-caste landlords made, I think, a deep impression on many untouchables (quoted by Shani 2018: 257).
Research by anthropologists across India in the twenty-first century shows how very important participation in elections is for poor people, giving them indeed a sense of themselves as equal citizens of the country, in spite of the very considerable inequalities to which they are subject in their daily lives – and which reduce the practical meaning of citizenship for them (Banerjee 2014; and, on the limitations of citizenship, Chatterjee 2004).
Elections at national and provincial/state levels have been held regularly ever since 1952, generally at intervals of five years, with the important exception of the period between 1975 and 1977, when Nehru’s daughter, India’s third prime minister, Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution and declared Emergency Rule, using powers that had been taken over from the colonial Government of India Act 1935. The history of India’s parliamentary elections, and of the country’s political leadership (summarized in tables 1.3 and 1.4), is a story of the long dominance of the Congress Party (INC) – interrupted only by the short periods in office of the Janata coalition government (1977–80), elected following the Emergency, and then of the Janata Dal government headed by V. P. Singh (1989–90) – and subsequently of the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was a mark of the failure of the Janata government that Indira Gandhi should have been returned to office, in January 1980, so soon after the end of the Emergency; and Mrs Gandhi’s son Rajiv then led the Congress to its greatest electoral victory in December 1984, riding a ‘sympathy wave’ caused by the assassination of his mother.
Rajiv, however, proved a disappointing prime minister, and the later 1980s also saw the BJP winning support partly through successful political theatre surrounding a dispute over an old mosque, the Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. Hindu nationalists claimed that the mosque stood on the site of a Hindu temple that marked the birthplace of the god Ram (see chapter 6). This, in our understanding of modern Indian history, was partly instrumental in bringing about a reinvention of India towards the end of the twentieth century, in what we think of as a third moment of historical change. The reinvention of India saw a big shift in economic policy in the direction of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of Hindu nationalism – described by Corbridge and Harriss (2000) as ‘elite revolts’ – together with what was called a ‘second democratic upsurge’ with the emergence of a new generation of political leaders from among the OBCs. From 1989 until 2014, no single party won a majority in national elections, and India was ruled by minority or coalition governments, the latter headed by the BJP (in the National Democratic Alliance) between 1998 and 2004, and by the Congress (in the United Progressive Alliance) between 2004 and 2014. The crushing victory of the BJP in the national elections of 2014 marked the ascendancy of the party. Its absolute hegemony, with the effective taking over of the mainstream of Indian politics by Hindu nationalism, and the emphatic shifting of that mainstream to the right (Palshikar 2015), was confirmed by the even more comprehensive victory that the party won in the 2019 elections. The BJP won more than 50 per cent of the vote in 11 of India’s major states (or 12 if we include also Uttar Pradesh in which the BJP came within a whisker of 50 per cent, see table 1.5), and only in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south, and Punjab in the north, was the party not powerfully represented. The elections of 2014 and 2019 can be described, therefore, as a fourth moment of historical change.
Table 1.3 Distribution of Votes of Major National Parties, Lok Sabha Elections, 1952–2019
SOURCE: Election Commission of India
KEY: BJP = Bharatiya Janata Party; BJS = Bharatiya Jana Sangh; BLD = Bharatiya Lok Dal; BSP = Bahujan Samaj Party; CPI = Communist Party of India; CPM = Communist Party of India (Marxist); INC = Indian National Congress; JD = Janata Dal; JNP = Janata Party
Table 1.4 Distribution of Seats Won in Lok Sabha Elections, by National Party, 1952–2019
SOURCE: Election Commission of India
KEY: see Table 1.3
Table 1.5 National Elections 2019, Vote Share and Seats Won, in Major States, by BJP and Congress
SOURCE: Election Commission of India
| BJP vote share % (seats) | INC vote share % (seats) | |
|---|---|---|
| Andhra Pradesh | 0.96 (0) | — |
| Assam | 36.05 (9) | 35.44 (3) |
| Bihar | 23.58 (17) | 7.70 (1) |
| Chhattisgarh | 50.70 (9) | 40.91 (2) |
| NCR Delhi | 56.56 (7) | 22.51 (0) |
| Goa | 51.18 (1) | 42.92 (1) |
| Gujarat | 62.21 (26) | 32.11 (0) |
| Haryana | 58.02 (10) | 28.42 (0) |
| Himachal Pradesh | 69.11 (4) | 27.30 (0) |
| Jammu & Kashmir | 46.39 (3) | 28.47 (0) |
| Jharkhand | 50.96 (11) | 15.63 (1) |
| Karnataka | 51.38 (25) | 31.88 (1) |
| Kerala | 12.93 (0) | 37.27 (15) |
| Madhya Pradesh | 58.00 (28) | 34.50 (1) |
| Maharashtra | 27.59 (23) |
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