Votes, Parties, and Seats

A Quantitative Analysis of Indian Parliamentary Elections, 1962–2014

Vani Kant Borooah

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319304861
• eBook ISBN: 9783319304878
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

'This starkly lucid and timely book absorbs the nuances of the largest festival – the elections – of the world's largest democracy. Hailing from a political family, the author conveys his passion and knowledge on the intricacies, as well as the heat and dust of his national fête. All data and events have been methodically examined in this absorbing analytical work which is an indispensable and scholarly book on the Indian elections.' – Thankom Arun, Professor at the University of Essex, UK This book provides a quantitative analysis of eight elections and an insight into voting patterns, detailing the election result for each candidate, for all the constituencies, in every Lok Sabha (the lower house of India's Bicameral-Parliament) general election from 1962 to 2014. The central purpose of this interrogation of data is to give shape to the notion of 'electoral efficiency', or the capacity of a party to convert votes into parliamentary seats. Parliamentary elections in India – and also elections to its state assemblies – are conducted under the First Past the Post (FPTP) system whereby a single representative for each of the 543 constituencies is elected as a Member of the Lok Sabha, on the basis of obtaining the largest number of all the candidates contesting that constituency. In brief, Votes, Parties, and Seats provides an in-depth study of the results of parliamentary general elections in India, and sheds light on why some parties are more efficient than others.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Vani Kant BorooahVotes, Parties, and Seats10.1007/978-3-319-30487-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Vani Kant Borooah¹

(1)

School of Economics, Ulster University, Newtownabbey, County Antrim, UK

Abstract

Borooah reviews the major developments in Indian politics from independence in 1947 till the latest Parliamentary General Election of 2014. He discusses the three pillars of India’s identity—democracy, unity, and secularism—and shows the influence of democracy on India’s unity and on the concept of secularism that it has adopted.

End Abstract

In his celebrated speech, delivered to India’s Constituent Assembly on the eve of 15 August 1947, to herald India’s independence from British rule, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, famously asked if the newly independent nation was ‘brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future’. If one conceives of India, as many Indians would, in terms of a trinity of attributes—democratic in government, secular in outlook, and united by geography and a sense of nationhood—then, in terms of the first of these, it would appear to have succeeded handsomely.

Since the Parliamentary General Election of 1951, which elected the first cohort of members to its lower house of Parliament (the Lok Sabha), India has proceeded to elect, in unbroken sequence, another 15 such cohorts so that the most recent Lok Sabha elections of 2014 gave to the country a government drawn from members to form the 16th Lok Sabha. Given the fractured and fraught experiences with democracy of India’s immediate neighbours (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Myanmar) and of a substantial number of countries which gained independence from colonial rule, it is indeed remarkable that independent India has known no other form of governmental authority save through elections.

Elections (which represent ‘formal democracy’) are a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for ‘substantive democracy’. In a ‘substantive democracy’, citizens not only vote, but also, having elected their representatives, continue to have a sense of involvement in public affairs engendered by a sense that their views are heeded by those they have chosen to represent them (Huber et al. 1997). By corollary, substantive democracy requires one to listen to opposing points of view and to respond to these in measured tones. The shrillness of public discourse in India, both within Parliament and outside it, may give the impression that substantive democracy, as opposed to its formal counterpart, is still a distant goal for the country. And yet, as Corbridge et al. (2013) note, India has progressed a long way along the road to becoming a genuine democracy: people participate in politics, are more conscious of their rights, and are aided in this by a plethora of rights-based bodies and movements (Cornwall and Nyamu‐Musembi 2004).

India’s real achievement in promoting substantive democracy has been at the level of the village. The Constitution (73rd Amendment) Act of 1993 made it mandatory for all villages to have a village council (Gram Sabha) consisting of all registered voters on the electoral roll of that village. The Gram Sabha was to be entrusted with the power of supervising the functioning of the elected village panchayat and to approve the panchayat’s development plan for the village and the associated budget. Consequently, in addition to voting, electors in villages had another form of political participation: they could attend Gram Sabha meetings and participate in its discussions. The 73rd Amendment Act stipulated that one-third of seats in the village panchayat should be reserved for women and disadvantaged groups like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. ¹

In delivering India’s ‘democratic achievement’, Nehru’s role in establishing the primacy of Parliament cannot be exaggerated. Even as stern a critic of Nehru as Anderson (2012) admitted that:

Nehru’s greatness, it is generally felt, was to rule as a democrat in a non-Western world teeming with dictators. Preceptor to his nation, he set an example from which those who came after him could not long depart. Tutored by him, Indian democracy found its feet, and has lasted ever since. That by conviction Nehru was a liberal democrat is clear. Nor was this a merely theoretical attachment to principles of parliamentary government. As Prime Minister, he took his duties in the Lok Sabha with a conscientious punctilio that put many Western rulers to shame, regularly speaking and debating in the chamber, and never resorted to rigging national elections or suppressing a wide range of opinion. So much is incontestable. (p. 26)

It is, of course, true that Nehru burnished his credentials as a democrat at a period when the party he headed—the Indian National Congress (INC)—dominated India’s political landscape. In the Lok Sabha elections of 1951, the INC received 45 percent of the vote and won 75 percent of the seats to the 1st Lok Sabha (364 seats out of a total of 489). Its closest rivals in that General Election were Independent candidates and the Socialist Party who took, respectively, 37 and 12 seats on the back of, respectively, 16 and 12 percent of the total vote. The Communist Party of India received only 3.3 percent of the vote, but managed to win 16 seats.

The dominance of the INC was unchanged in subsequent General Elections. In the General Election of 1957, the INC received 45 percent of the national vote to take 75 percent of the available Lok Sabha seats (371 seats out of the total of 494); in the 1962 General Election, the INC received 48 percent of the vote and won 361, out of an available 494, seats (75 percent), while in the 1967 General Election, which was the first after Nehru’s death in 1964, the INC received 41 percent of the vote to win 283 out of a total of 520 seats (54 percent). The dominance of the INC in Indian parliamentary elections survived the 1971 General Election—when on the back of nearly 44 percent of the national vote, it won 352 seats in a House of 546—before coming to a juddering halt in 1977.

The Lok Sabha elections of 1977 were held after the longest period between two successive elections in India, the last elections being held six years earlier in 1971. It offered voters an opportunity to express their views on (Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter) Indira Gandhi’s imposition of a state of Emergency in India in 1975. ² This was triggered by the Allahabad High Court setting aside Mrs Gandhi’s election as the member for Rae Bareli, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the Lok Sabha election of 1971 because it found that as Prime Minister, she had illegally used the machinery of government for electoral purposes. Instead of stepping aside in favour of a caretaker Prime Minister, pending the outcome of her appeal to the Supreme Court, Mrs Gandhi imposed an ‘Emergency’. It lasted 21 months, from June 1975 till March 1977, and during this period ‘elections were suspended, political and civil organisations were disbanded, and the media was gagged’ (Corbridge et al. 2013).

The electorate’s verdict in the Lok Sabha elections of 1977 could not have been clearer: the vote share of the INC fell from 44 percent in the 1971 General Election to 35 percent in 1977 with a corresponding fall from 352 to 154 in the number of Lok Sabha seats held by the party. Mrs Gandhi lost her Rae Bareilly seat, and at the age of 81, Morarji Desai became India’s fourth Prime Minister. ³

Prior to the Lok Sabha election of 1977, the main opposition to the INC came from Independent candidates, the communists, and a party, espousing economic liberalism (the Swatantra Party), which had come to prominence in the Lok Sabha election of 1962 winning 18 seats with nearly 8 percent of the national vote. After the 1977 Lok Sabha election, however, a new form of opposition emerged in the shape of a coalition of parties, of various ideologies, which came together solely for the purpose of winning elections by fielding common candidates. This amalgam was called the Janata Party, and it formed the post-1977 government with Desai as Prime Minister, but with Charan Singh, leader of the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD)—one of the Janata Party’s most powerful constituents—and Home Minister and also Deputy Prime Minister to Desai, waiting in the wings to take over.

If proof was ever needed of the futility of relying for stable government on a coalition of partners, united by nothing except electoral convenience, and led by persons of overweening political ambition, then the Janata Party government of 1977 provided it in abundance. Within two years, the BLD, by threatening to withdraw its support from the government, made Desai’s position untenable; his resignation in July 1979 was quickly followed by Charan Singh taking over as Prime Minister. Singh’s support, however, quickly haemorrhaged away, and he lasted just three weeks. Fresh elections were scheduled for 1980. The INC, under Mrs Gandhi, returned in triumph winning that election and (under the leadership of her son Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her as Prime Minister, after her assassination in October 1984) winning the next election, in December 1984, as well.

The Lok Sabha elections of 1989 were significant for three reasons.

1.

They marked the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a serious political force when it won 85 Lok Sabha seats in that election; it, thereby, redeemed itself after the indignity of winning just two seats in its electoral debut in the previous Lok Sabha elections of 1984.

2.

The 1989 election and the 1998 Lok Sabha elections bookended a period of parliamentary instability during which in a span of 10 years, India voted in five Lok Sabha elections: 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, and 1999. ⁴

3.

In the decade after the 1989 Lok Sabha elections, India experienced—what Jaffrelot (2003) termed—a ‘silent revolution’ as lower-status groups increasingly captured political office and used political power to alter the balance of power between the upper and the lower castes. Each of these aspects is discussed, in turn, below.

1.1 The Rise of the BJP

The rise of the BJP was significant in two respects: (i) it offered voters, in the form of Hindu nationalism, an alternative to the ‘secular’ model propagated by Nehru and which was the bedrock of the INC’s ideology ⁵ and (ii) for the first time, there was the prospect of two-party democracy in India. After two short-lived attempts to be a party of government (following the Lok Sabha elections of 1996, a BJP-led government lasted 13 days, and following the 1998 Lok Sabha elections, a BJP-led government lasted just over a year), the BJP, as the senior partner in a coalition of other parties, was at last able to offer the country stable government in 1999 when Prime Minister Vajpayee’s government saw out the full five years of the 13th Lok Sabha and the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 ushered in a BJP majority government with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.

1.2 Political Instability during the 1990s

In terms of government, the outcome of the 1989 election was that the INC, even though it was the largest single party, went into opposition and a minority ‘National Front’ government, with V.P. Singh as Prime Minister, was formed with support from the Leftist Parties and the BJP. Subsequent infighting within the parties comprising the ‘National Front’, in conjunction with the BJP withdrawing its support over the Ayodhya temple issue, resulted in the government resigning after losing a vote of confidence in November 1990. The new government was another minority government, with Chandra Shekhar as Prime Minister, this time supported by the INC. However, within the next few months, the INC withdrew its support—on the charge that the government was ‘spying’ on the INC’s leader, Rajiv Gandhi—paving the way for the dissolution of the 9th Lok Sabha and the start of the General Election campaign of 1991.

After the 1991 elections, the INC, with 244 seats, formed the government (with Narasimha Rao as Prime M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Anatomy of Indian Parliamentary Elections
• 3. Estimating the Likelihood of Winning Parliamentary Constituencies
• 4. Incumbents, Challengers, and Electoral Risk
• 5. Analysis of Vote Shares
• 6. The Relationship Between Votes and Seats
• 7. The Concentration and Distribution of Votes
• 8. Conclusions
• Backmatter