Tactical voting in our democracy

Psephologists and social scientists might have lot more attention to pay to "tactical voting" statistics for a better understanding of our democracy

Leaders like Mayawati and Navjot Singh Sidhu were barred from campaigning for two-three days by the Election Commission (EC) in this Lok Sabha elections for mixing religion with political discourse while electioneering. Supposedly they crossed the lakshmanrekha while engineering "tactical voting" to get votes from minority communities. There were several accusations of "vote transfer" too in this election. In fact, "tactical voting" is very common in a multi-party democracy like India. There is data evidence that a significant section of voters do vote differently in Lok Sabha and state Assembly elections. Isn’t that also tactical voting?

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