Making sense of 21st century politics

PARTY COMPETITION IN INDIAN STATES: ELECTORAL POLITICS IN POST-CONGRESS POLITY
Edited by Suhas Palshikar, K C Suri and Yogendra Yadav
Oxford University Press
563 pages; Rs 1,445

Pollsters got it wrong three times in a row. In 2004, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government was widely predicted to come back to power. That did not happen. In 2009, the election outcome turned out to be different from most of the pre-poll surveys. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) created a record of sorts by being re-elected after completing a full term. Then in 2014, most pollsters were way off the mark yet again. The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) created history by securing an absolute majority on its own after nearly three decades.

Do these serial misses suggest that the Indian polity has undergone major transformation, but analysts are yet to catch up with the new reality? Politics indeed has changed and some of those changes have been aptly captured in the book under review. Although the book was written before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, some of the theoretical tools explained in it may well be applied to make sense of the BJP's recent victory.

The best chapter of the book is the one that analyses the outcome of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections with the help of twin concepts of fortuna and virtu. "Fortuna is not just what we mean today by fortune or plain luck. It stands for all the contingent externalities - context, circumstances, resources, or their absence - that are not our making but which deeply condition our lives. Virtu is definitely not we call virtues; it stands for human agency, volition, prowess, and will that may or may not take a virtuous form," write Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar in the chapter analysing 2009 Lok Sabha elections.  And the re-election of the UPA in 2009 "can be best understood as occupying the space in between fortuna and virtu - that the UPA, and Congress in particular, did not show any great political judgement but was successful in taking advantage of the situation."

The crux of the argument is that the Congress-led UPA got re-elected in 2009 owing to favourable circumstances, or contingent externalities, as the authors put it. Social welfare schemes, such as rural employment guarantee scheme and farm loan waiver, were seen as vote catchers for the UPA. But the poor implementation of these schemes would have angered more people than winning them over. The Congress perhaps won the elections because the going was generally good in the country, thanks to years of unprecedented robust economic growth.

The same fortuna-virtu concepts may be employed to make sense of the BJP's record electoral victory in 2014. Prolonged economic slowdown and persistently high inflation had made life difficult. And there was serious erosion in the credibility of the UPA government because of the spate of scams. People, therefore, were looking for a saviour to restore the credibility of the government and put the country on a higher growth path once again. The Modi-led BJP was seen to fit the bill.

Something such as this would not have happened in the India of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when people used to vote with their caste and religion. And here is a second noticeable trend of the new Indian polity that the authors of this book have persuasively presented. "While caste or community continues to be primary building bloc of political affiliation at the micro-level, the politics of building macro-political coalition based on these blocks has suffered a setback. In this sense, the politics of social identity has hit the point of saturation, thus opening the possibility of other kinds of mobilisations," the authors argue. Did the 2014 Lok Sabha elections give us those other forms of mobilisations? Perhaps yes.

Edited by Suhas Palshikar, K C Suri and Yogendra Yadav, the volume runs into 25 chapters analysing electoral trends in various states in acknowledgement of the fact that the "state is the main theatre where political competition unfolds and shapes". In this sense, the book offers insights into how politics in states has begun to have decisive impact on the national political arena.

Drawing extensively from pre- and post-election surveys conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the book has rich collection of data related to Indian elections. I wonder if the authors would have liked to revise some of their theses if they had written these essays after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The post-Congress polity has entered a new phase that requires a whole new set of ideas to make sense of. But given the richness of data and vastness of subjects covered in the volume, it is a must-read for all students of Indian politics.