Dissecting the 2004 mandate

Election results analysis in India has seen many phases. Initially, such analysis would mostly be restricted to assessments of the margins by which candidates of different political parties won or lost. Then came a phase when the analysis focused not just on the margins of victory or loss, but also on the increase or decline in the share of votes polled in an election by different candidates.

Evidently, this gave new insights into the way elections were fought. Such analysis was also a demand of the kind of electoral politics that began to prevail since the late 1980s. A simple analysis of the margin of victory or loss was enough when a single political party could form a government at the Centre or in the states. But the emergence of coalition politics meant that both the electorate and the political parties needed to understand how vote shares in multi-polar contests improved or undermined the prospects of candidates in electoral fray.

 

Yogendra Yadav, who along with Sandeep Shastri and K C Suri has edited the volume under review, is among the early pioneers of such election analysis in India. For him, concepts such as anti-incumbency or the TINA (there is no alternative) factor are important. But what are equally, if not more, important as a tool to understand election results is how even an improved share in votes may not result in a corresponding increase in the number of seats won by a political party. And how the vote-share equation works in a situation where almost every major political party has forged a coalition to stake claim to form the government at the Centre.

A more important question that such analysis has sought to answer pertains to the nature of the popular mandate the election results provide to the various political parties that contest the polls. Winning a sufficient number of seats and cobbling together a government with the help of some other political parties do not necessarily mean that the coalition partners have secured the mandate of the people to rule the country.

The issue is important. To argue that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had in 2004 received the people’s mandate to rule the country for five years is fallacious. For, if only the National Democratic Alliance had forged a slightly different alliance or if some of its alliance partners had fared a little better, Atal Behari Vajpayee could well have cobbled together a government at the Centre instead of the UPA. Would the mandate of the people have changed in such a situation?

Many of these questions have been answered by the 22 essays that Yadav, Shastri and Suri have put together in this volume. The essays cover almost all the important states and analyse the 2004 general elections in the context of the political situation that prevailed in each of them. In the process, Yadav and his co-essayists have demolished many a myth associated with the 2004 election results.

For instance, Yadav explains, with the support of data, how NDA’s defeat and UPA’s victory in 2004 were much less sweeping than they appeared on the afternoon of the day of counting. The national verdict, according to him, could not be explained with reference to “short-term factors” like the impact of political campaigns, leadership of the parties engaged in the electoral battle or the performance of the government. Yadav’s thesis is that the 2004 verdict must be explained through long-term structuring of political choices and by other factors such as the popular assessment of the state governments and the new electoral coalitions that were formed.

One of the major attractions of the book is the wealth of election results data that it has compiled and laid out in a manner that makes it easy for readers to understand their implications. Purists might complain that the book’s publication was inordinately delayed, as it came out after the 2009 elections. Such a book, with its lucid explanation of the complex nature of the 2004 election mandate, would have been hugely useful for political parties and their leaders if it had come a little before the 2009 general elections. Yadav may argue that his main essay and his key findings came out in a slightly different form in a journal before the 2009 general elections. But there is no doubt that his essay makes a far greater impact only when it is read along with the detailed analyses in the other 21 chapters and the data. Hopefully, the book on 2009 general elections will be published much before 2014 or whenever the next elections are held.

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ELECTORAL POLITCS IN INDIAN STATES
LOK SABHA ELECTIONS IN 2004 AND BEYOND

Ed Sandeep Shastri, K C Suri & Yogendra Yadav
OUP; Rs 795; XVI + 454