Why India Votes?

Mukulika Banerjee

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317341659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why India Votes? offers a fascinating account of the Indian electorate through a series of comprehensive ethnographic explorations conducted across the country — Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Rajasthan. It probes the motivations of ordinary voters, what they think about politicians, the electoral process, democracy and their own role within it. This book will be useful to scholars and students of political science, anthropology and sociology, those in media and politics, and those interested in elections and democracy as also the informed general reader.

I
Introduction

Vignette 1

One afternoon in March, I stopped to collect my customary paan from the little kiosk, a box balanced on four poles, by the highway that ran through my research villages. Not many people were around, most people having retired indoors for some quiet time after lunch. I chatted with Dukhai Dom as he put my paan together deftly — betel leaf, a few betel nuts, a lick of shiny golden gloop and a clove. I knew him well, having learnt a lot about paddy farming from talking to him out in the farmlands that surrounded the village. He worked as ‘labour’, earning about ₹80 a day, on the days that his emaciated body allowed him to work. The rest of the time he earned a few paise from selling cigarettes and paan on the rare occasion that anyone who could actually afford one stopped at his kiosk. I asked him today, as I asked everyone I knew at some point, whether he would vote in the next elections. He looked up quickly, his hands stopping for a second, and asked me ‘Why wouldn’t I? Of course I will!’ I wondered if he knew that it was becoming mandatory to produce a photo identity in order to vote. He smiled and replied he had. I asked if I could see it the next time I was in his home. His smile got broader and conspiratorial. ‘It’s not at home’ he said and handed my paan to me and as I tucked it into my mouth, he rummage among a mass of worn plastic bags, some matchboxes and empty jam bottles behind him. From this assortment he produced a plastic bag that looked stronger than the others, the sort that you would get from one of the bigger shops in a town. From within it he produced a beaten old tin, its latch firmly closed. Inside lay more plastic bags and an envelope, each of which he unwrapped carefully as if handling rods in a nuclear reactor. I waited patiently, wondering if he was looking for cigarettes, a new ingredient for paan or his spectacles. Instead, he produced the unmistakable laminated card, bearing the words ‘Electoral Photo Identity Card’ along with Dukhai’s photograph, his age and father’s name on it.

The broad smile on his face as he held it up for me to see told a story that this book will try to recount.¹

Vignette 2

One morning in May, when the agricultural grain market was winding down from a busy season of wheat sales, we found Rukmini Bai, an elderly woman who worked in the trading yard, wiping away tears with the end of her sari. She was inconsolable, and explained that the day before she had been unable to vote at the elections because she did not have the correct identification. She had produced other pieces of paper with no success, so in the end, she had to wait outside the polling booth and watch everyone else emerge with newly-inked fingers proving that they had cast their vote, while her own remained bare. When we asked why this made her so sad she explained that she always wanted to vote because every vote was important and she did not want to waste hers. When we tried to console her saying that it was after all, only one vote, and that she should not feel so bad about affecting the outcome, she paused amidst her tears and said, ‘You see me? My work is to sweep up all the grain that falls from the sacks and the weighing scales on the floor. At the end of the day, I sell what I have collected and I am allowed to keep half the money. That is my income. So you see, I understand the value of each grain of wheat. On the floor they look insignificant, just one isolated grain of wheat, but each grain that is added to the heap determines what I earn. My vote is like those grains of wheat’.²

‘Why India Votes’ is a big question in two senses. First, Indian voters make up one-sixth of the world’s electorate, so their attitudes to elections really do matter to the political future of the planet, and their experience may prove helpful to understanding democracies, old and new, elsewhere. Second, in a polity that faces so many challenges to its own social and political cohesion, what the masses think about voting seems a vital indicator of how India may survive and evolve in the future. Sceptics are right to say that elections alone do not make a true democracy, but India’s problems will surely be still greater if its people lose faith in the electoral process.³ As the opening vignettes show, elections mean a great deal to Indian voters, and has more significance for them, I would suggest, than for many voters in established democracies elsewhere. This book will show in detail that for many Indian voters, and especially the poor, voting is not just a means to elect governments. Rather, the very act of voting is seen by them as meaningful, as an end in itself, which expresses the virtues of citizenship, accountability and civility that they wish to see in ordinary life, but rarely can. For these voters, Election Day creates a time out of time, a carnival space, where the everyday reality of inequality and injustice is suspended, and popular sovereignty asserted for a day.

Why should people bother to vote? The importance of this question has dogged public discussions for at least 50 years. Influenced by certain kinds of economist thinking, some rationalist scholars have considered the value of voting in terms of the payoff for the individual, with the assumption that people will vote only if they get something out of it. Given that voting is a large group activity, the problem of the ‘free rider’ — a person who believes that his individual contribution doesn’t make any difference to a collective activity and so decides to ride the wave rather than make an effort himself — has complicated matters further. It poses the question why anyone should bother to vote at all, given that a single vote rarely makes a difference to an election result, and it is easy to excuse one’s apathy behind others’ participation. This is a sentiment that most readers will recognise from their own thoughts on voting day. Voting has thus emerged as ‘the paradigmatic case of the problem of the worthlessness of individual contributions to the actions of large groups’ (Runciman 2008). And yet, as Rukmini Bai explained in ‘Vignette 2’, some people might believe in exactly the opposite proposition.

In India, the question of why one should bother to vote at all has particular salience. The size of the electorate here is vast (larger than North America and Europe combined) so each constituency has millions of voters where one vote is a proverbial drop in the ocean. The motivation to free ride would be very tempting given how easily one person’s absence could be missed. Furthermore, the instances of corruption in the political class are regularly exposed, thereby damaging the credibility of elected representatives severely. And finally, despite India’s famed economic growth rates and high gross domestic product (GDP), per capita income levels remain low while poverty, disease and illiteracy remain alarmingly high, making disenchantment with the state and the electoral process understandable among this section of the electorate.

Despite these factors, research from India shows that the Indian electorate behaves in unexpected, indeed baffling, ways. Despite voting not being compulsory, and the prevalence of high degrees of illiteracy and poverty — which are regarded elsewhere as an obstacle to voting — turnout has been consistently high for 60 years, and has even risen in recent decades. Moreover, among the most enthusiastic are the poorest and most disadvantaged. Furthermore, unlike many other countries, turnout is higher the more local the election. And women do not, despite their greater distance from public discussions about politics, lag behind in commitment to the voting process (NES data).⁴ We may ask, therefore, whether these trends make for a certain ‘Indianness’ in Indian elections, and whether this distinctiveness is likely to continue in the future.

By asking ‘why India votes’ this study examines the motivations and opinions of ordinary voters, without assuming, as many might do, that poor people vote with enthusiasm because they can simply be bought off or coerced into voting for particular parties. This study introduces three major innovations. First, it focuses on ordinary Indians’ experience of elections, and on what elections mean to them. Above all, it explores what they think they are doing when they vote. Second, it explores the meaning of elections through the ethnographic method in 12 different locations across India to provide a genuinely national picture — something that is fairly unprecedented. Third, the research is continually informed and engaged with survey research through constant dialogue and discussion with political scientists who study Indian elections. Using these new approaches, this study hopes to present a fresh look at elections — one that lets the questions determine the choice of methodology rather than letting the methods dictate the questions.

These three innovations are an attempt to capture the reasons why the relatively ‘new’ idea of elections has to come to acquire such force in India. How does the novel philosophical concept of universal suffrage in an otherwise unequal setting resonate with what Charles Taylor calls the ‘social imaginaries’ of Indian society? Taylor uses the concept of the social imaginary to explore why democracies take root in some places but not others. He does this by examining why democracy sprouted in India but not in Pakistan, even though both achieved independence from the British Raj at the same time. In this, earlier post-war assumptions that democratic development correlates with economic development have been proven to be wide off the mark. Thus, rather than asking what the conditions for democracy are, Taylor proposes that we consider different cultures of democracy in the plural, in the same way that we now speak of multiple modernities. And again, Taylor evokes the existence of the Indian Republic, the world’s biggest democracy, to make his point. Indian democracy is robustly healthy, particularly in its rising or steady voter turnouts, which are in sharp contrast to the declining turnouts in older democratic regimes of the North Atlantic world. This forces us to recognise that what we might be witnessing is not the same form of government in different regions, but rather the particularity of Indian democracy’s dynamic mode of operation, which is very different from what we see in northern societies. Therefore, Taylor proposes a comparative study of democracies that does not look for general laws (such as the American development theory of the postwar period) but instead turns to an older tradition originating with Montesquieu, where comparison ‘does not aim at general truths but at enlightening contrasts where the particular features stand out in their differences’ (Taylor 2007: 119).

The ‘social imaginary’ is one such dimension of comparison proposed by Taylor. Through the use of this term, Taylor attempts to get to ‘the ways in which people imagine their social existence — how they fit together with others and how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (ibid.). The distinction that Taylor draws between social imaginary and social theory is of particular interest in the context of this book and my larger argument about popular perceptions of democracy in India, given my interest in probing the distinctions and overlap between popular understandings and philosophical concepts. Taylor outlines three major differences:

1. Social imaginary is about the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, which is often not expressed in theoretical terms but is, instead, carried in images, stories, legends and so on;
2. social imaginary is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society, while theory is often the possession of small minority; and
3. social imaginary is the common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy, while theory can circulate only among elites (2007: 19).

The social imaginaries of democracy can therefore be both the democratic vision for the future and the pre-democratic repertoires that are transformed and adapted to fit the new understandings and practices to achieve the ideal. Both of these shape the variable successes with democracy that we witness in different settings. In each case, the existing pre-democratic repertoires vary and shape the pathways to the democratic goal.

As an anthropologist, I would argue that the ethnographic method is the ideal way in which to gain access to social imaginaries, because it privileges people’s ideas over social theories and pays close attention to the popular practices and popular imagination that Taylor argues is the characteristic of social imaginaries. Ethnographers pay close attention to ‘images, stories, legends’ and such material provides an understanding of how people share and perpetuate ideas of everyday philosophical importance. It is for this reason that this book presents this kind of material in abundance and we have deliberately tried to keep our mediations as social scientists to a minimum, as that invariably brings about the kind of mediation through social theory that Taylor warns against.

I realised the importance of an ethnographic perspective on elections based on a number of observations, both as an Indian citizen and from my work as a social anthropologist. Three things struck me:

• (a) Quantity: An Indian national election is the largest humanly organised event in the world, with over 728 million voters, 11 million election officials, over 1 million voting machines, more than 7 million polling booths and 543 constituencies. Despite this mind-boggling scale of operations, they are run with an exemplary efficiency rarely seen in other areas of state (or indeed private-sector) delivery, and this in itself marks elections out as an area of distinctive experience.
• (b) Quality: India’s elections are noisy, colourful and rambunctious. Election hoardings loom large on city skylines, murals and posters appear on building walls, and any advertisement, from soap to scooters, incorporates election-related themes and motifs in its copy. Colourful bunting and banners festoon lanes, tea stalls and highways, and dead trees burst into colour with flags. Loud hailers parade the streets, dust is churned by thousands of public meetings and tempers run high as traffic is stalled by processions of canvassing supporters. In the media and in conversation at home and work, elections generate endless passionate discussion, and for a while at least, comparison of politicians displaces that of film stars, and voting receives as much attention as cricket scores. Indian elections are thus a distinctive social and sensory experience and it is evident that most people in India actually enjoy an election and throw themselves into the experience in a big way.
• (c) Mystery: Judging by trends elsewhere, especially in the West, and the political science orthodoxy that explains them, the data from India seems to defy predictions about how its elections should fare.

Commentators with various methodological leanings have sought to explain these unusual trends, but most tend to reduce the question of why Indians vote to a simple co-efficient of whom they vote for. Traditionally, scholarly perspectives on elections have been mainly institutional — looking at the statutes and arrangements — or psephological, assessing who votes for whom and why.⁵ These approaches ignore the early warning by influential political scientists that political participation is a multi-dimensional rather than a unitary phenomenon, which includes voting, campaigning, cooperative activities, and citizen-initiated contacts, and also that ‘voting can be about the gratification of the act itself and not necessarily some expected outcome’ (Verba et al. 1971: 16). Focusing too narrowly on the issue of ‘who voted for whom’ runs the danger of being limited and patronising. Explanations of who the masses vote for typically portray the average voter as an uneducated or illiterate person who is essentially passive; who doesn’t know better; and who can be variously coerced or swayed by incentives, landlords, higher castes, priests and mullahs or political brokers. To the extent that voters are seen as active and thinking, their motivations are explained either in the narrowly rational terms of self-interest — using votes to seek better roads and schools — or as the irrational expression of primordial loyalty to a particular community. Though there is clearly much truth in all of this, particularly in people’s decisions about who to vote for, my instinct was that this approach was ultimately reductionist and did not capture the whole story about popular participation.⁶ The question of whom people vote for has, without doubt, increasingly begun to generate complex and nuanced answers, not least because of the diversity of political parties and of the political landscape.⁷ The need to explain why certain parties and candidates won popular support in certain elections and not in others has motivated a wide range of scholars to provide sophisticated analyses of voting behaviour (Ahuja and Chhibber 2009; Chandra 2007; Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2007; among others). But analysis also showed that despite the growing number of political parties, there has also been an increasing ‘flattening of political choices’, whereby despite their differing vote constituencies and ideologies, political parties have come to resemble each other when in power (Yadav and Palshikar 2009). Their performance in terms of governance and delivery of development programmes has often been poor, and marked by the hubris and corruption that power brings. For the common voter, therefore, the expectation that voting for ‘their’ party could bring about improvement has often been a tarnished hope and could understandably cause disillusionment with the whole political system. And yet, enthusiasm about voting seems to have persisted and increased among large sections of the electorate, despite the fact that their elected representatives bring most of them negligible improvements in living standards. Surely you cannot fool all of the people all the time? Why do they vote?

However, my skepticism about reductive explanations of higher voter turnout mainly stemmed from my specific experiences as a social anthropologist and ethnographer. My first book was a reassessment, based on oral histories and archival research, of the nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar anti-colonial movement in the North-West Frontier during the 1930s and 1940s (Banerjee 2001). Where the British, and even the Indian National Congress, had largely seen the mass of participants as an unthinking rabble hoodwinked by a charismatic leader (Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan), my conversa...