Celebrating India’s Electoral Diversity
Ajit Phadnis
HOW INDIA VOTES: A STATE-BY-STATE LOOK by Ashutosh Kumar Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi, 2018, 472 pp., 1395
April 2019, volume 43, No 4

The historian Ramchandra Guha had once observed that two of the things that keep India together are cricket and Bollywood. If one were to think of a third unifying element it would undoubtedly be the national election. However, despite its pan-India appeal and its consistency in attracting wide public participation, it is surprising that the national election in India has not received the kind of nuanced attention that it deserves. It is not just a once-in-five-years examination that political parties and politicians are required to pass in order to be ‘promoted’ to the next government, although the media often projects it in this manner. However, a less highlighted aspect is that elections in India also reflect an unrecognized form of diversity: its ‘electoral’ diversity, which receives much less attention in comparison to the country’s diversity in other realms such as culture, history and ethnicity.

One may argue that the 2014 national election in India marked a fall back to ‘uniformity’ as there was a common theme (‘the Modi wave’) that found resonance in many States. This argument could be partially challenged by citing instances of States (West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Telangana) where regional fronts continued to hold fort. However, even if one concedes that Modi’s PM candidature left a preeminent imprint on the election, I argue that the diversity story still persists. The main change in this election was that while there was commonality in the choice of the prime ministerial candidate, there was wide variation in the reasons why people chose to support the candidate. This variation is clearly visible when we turn to a State-specific analysis of the election results. For instance, the grand narrative in the State of Uttar Pradesh was that the BJP gain was driven by the shift in the non-Yadav OBC support in favour of the Party, but the story in the neighbouring State of Uttarakhand was quite different, with women voters having played an influential role. As we move further East we find a different narrative in the State of Assam where the Assamese-speaking adivasi voters had a defining influence. These disparate narratives suggest a striking peculiarity of the 2014 elections: The mandate in favour of Narendra Modi was driven by some sort of an ‘overlapping consensus’, where people from different States collectively voted for Modi but for altogether different reasons.

This supposition opens the doors to more questions: What was the content of this overlapping consensus? How did Modi manage to tailor his communication in order to appeal to the constituents in different States? These are important questions, whose answers cannot be readily inferred from a macro-analysis of election results. Macro-analysis is, by design, efforts to find common threads or the binding forces reflected in the data. However, the problem with using a uniformity-inducing tool to explore a diverse phenomenon such as the 2014 election is that it leads to the overlooking of many nuanced insights. This argument, of course, does not intend to, in any way, criticize the usefulness of macro-studies; quite to the contrary they are extremely essential to track nation-wide patterns and the four macro-studies presented in the book are a flawless exposition of how to carry out a macro-study.

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