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Indian elections 2009: Contests in Context

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1In the spring of 2009, India will hold its 15th general election – a political event that is major in multiple ways. One, given the size of the Indian population, these elections will be, as always, the most massive in the world: 714 million voters, spread over 28 states and 7 union territories, will be called upon to elect 543 representatives to the Lok Sabha, the House of the People. Two, as in all democracies, general elections in India are a major ritual, reasserting at regular intervals that governments are chosen by the people. Indeed elections are both a selection and a rejection of candidates, parties, ideas, and policies. As such, they are a pace setter and are keenly watched by the international community - given the growing global importance of India - and of course by India’s immediate neighbours. Three, while Indian politics has been, since the 1980s, increasingly revolving around regional dynamics, general elections are a key moment to observe how issues are being reframed, highlighted or on the contrary ignored when it comes to national level political debates.

  • 1  See Yadav, Yogendra (2004) 'The Elusive Mandate of 2004', Economic and Political Weekly, (...)

2What will be the electoral verdict in 2009? Any attempt to answer this question at this stage is loaded with serious academic risk, for at least two reasons: Indian election results are notoriously unpredictable; moreover the interpretation of the vote is itself fraught with risk, given the vast amount of data that must be available for each of the 543 constituencies before scientifically valid conclusions can be drawn1. With such a large and diverse population, this exercise requires methodologically rigorous surveys and large samples, and is best left to specialized institutes equipped to undertake such studies.

3The focus of this issue of SAMAJ will therefore not be on the detailed analysis of the results of these elections, but on some of the multiple contests that constitute the ongoing dynamics of the polity, and come to a head at the time when the parties and electorate make their choices – between candidates, issues and political platforms.  We want to analyse contests that take place in social, spatial and institutional terrains - in their historical and scientific contexts. In other words, we invite papers that will help situate these elections both in the current evolution of Indian democracy and in election studies as a distinct academic field.

4Indeed we would like to invite reflexive analyses on the study of elections as such. Election time is always marked by a strong collaboration between the media and political scientists. In this context, two questions seem to be of importance. One, how does the dramatic media expansion of the past years (particularly in terms of news channels) impact the electoral campaign? How have political parties responded to it? Has there been a change in the way the media report on candidates? To what extent have the media supported the demand, by civil society organizations, for more information on candidates in general and sitting representatives in particular?

  • 2  See, among others: Butler, David; Lahiri, Ashok Kumar & Roy, Prannoy (1989) India Decides: (...)
  • 3  Yadav, Yogendra (2007) 'Invitation to a Dialogue: What Work does ‘Fieldwork’ do in the (...)

5Two, even though psephology, as a distinct subfield of political science, will dominate the media from the opening of the electoral campaign to the weeks following the announcement of results, elections studies in India have long been characterised by the importance of case studies, documenting the electoral process in a particular state, district or village, and quantitative studies based on large surveys have come to occupy a preeminent position only in the 1990s2. What do political sociology, anthropology, but also geography, tell us about elections? To what extent is there a “dialogue”3 between these different approaches today?

6These elections will generate, as always, a large number of predictions, descriptions and ex-post analyses. To see beyond the media hype, it appears necessary to compare them to the elections of the past 15 years or so, regarding three aspects linked to the three phases of the electoral process, i.e. the campaign, the vote, and government formation.

  • 4  Freitag, Sandra B. (1989) Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of (...)

7The first phase is of course concerned with the electoral campaign itself – a major moment for the “performance of politics”4, a time when parties and candidates assert their specificity and when the major issues at stake appear with greater clarity. Here two relatively recent phenomena are of interest, and require us to take a step backward.  Firstly, there has been a series of initiatives in the past ten years, by civil society organizations, to reform the electoral process, i.e. to salvage it from the throes of corruption and crime, or “money and muscle power”. The support of various Election commissioners to some of these initiatives has translated into a set of new legal obligations for candidates, but has also contributed to strengthening an ambiguous discourse, amplified by the media, on the electoral process. How do these initiatives actually impact elections? To what extent are the new rules implemented or even referred to? More generally, what seems to be the impact of this judgmental discourse?  

8Two, is there a shift in the type of issues that are given pride of place in the campaign? For instance, do the recent national debates on foreign policy issues find a place in the electoral discourse, or do these remain dominated by basic developmental concerns? Foreign policy was a consensual area in earlier Indian elections but has become highly contentious in recent years, to the extent that the very survival of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government was severely threatened in July 2008 when the Left parties withdrew their support. After the 26th November 2008 terrorist attacks and the consequent strained relations between India and Pakistan, as well as the army offensive against the LTTE in Sri Lanka, India’s relations with its neighbours acquires new salience in these elections. We therefore need to analyse how foreign policy issues figure in the election campaign and how they are perceived in the neighbourhood.

9The second phase of the electoral process, that is, the vote, cannot be analysed without referring to identity issues. Indeed, studies on Indian elections have consistently highlighted the weight of caste/ethnicity and religion in voters’ preferences and in parties’ strategies. New, locally-based case studies would help us reassess the validity of this trope, in the context of changing social dynamics, such as growing urbanization, for instance. Can we observe significant shifts in the way castes and communities are mobilised as such? How does identity politics operate in national elections in 2009?

  • 5  See for instance: Arora, Balveer (2002) 'Political Parties and the Party System: The (...)

10The third phase of the electoral process is government formation. Here again a few “classical” topics deserve a renewed examination. The federalisation of the party system and the emergence of durable federal coalitions are processes that have been well documented5. The Union has been governed, since 1996, by coalitions – and it is unlikely that 2009 will reverse this trend. What is often called “the era of coalitions” has been characterized by an increasing stability of governments, both at the Centre and in the states. But the relationship between electoral alliances and governmental coalitions at the Centre and those in the states is crucial to an understanding of the evolution of Indian federalism. Multilevel federalism has its own logic of concurrent and often competing electoral mandates, and from these multiple verdicts a governmental majority has to be teased out in the Lok Sabha. The fluctuating contours of the pool of ‘coalitionable’ single-state and multi-state parties and their relationship with the two major All-India parties have to be factored into our analysis. The intricate processes of bargaining and negotiation, ranging from electoral understandings on seat adjustments to pre - electoral alliances and post-electoral accords, have as their ultimate objective a hopefully stable coalition government. What kind of pattern arises from the series of coalitions that have been formed at the states and at the national level for the past 15 years or so?

11The issue's coordinators are: Balveer Arora (Professor of political science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (Research fellow in political science, Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Paris, and Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi).

12Propositions should state what empirical material will be used and how the paper contributes to the questions raised by the special issue.

13Deadlines: Proposals (100 to 150 words) by the April 3, 2009; articles by July 15, 2009. Final articles should be of 6,000 to 8,000 words.

14To submit an article, please contact: tawalama@ehess.fr

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Notes

1 See Yadav, Yogendra (2004) 'The Elusive Mandate of 2004', Economic and Political Weekly, December 18.
2 See, among others: Butler, David; Lahiri, Ashok Kumar & Roy, Prannoy (1989) India Decides: Elections 1952-1989, New Delhi: Aroon Purie, and Kondo, Norio (2007) Election Studies in India, Discussion Paper n°98, Institute of Developing Economies-Japan External Trade Organization, March, http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Download/Dp/pdf/098.pdf
3 Yadav, Yogendra (2007) 'Invitation to a Dialogue: What Work does ‘Fieldwork’ do in the Field of Elections?', in A.M. Shah, The Grassroots of Democracy: Field Studies of Indian Elections, Delhi: Permanent Black.
4 Freitag, Sandra B. (1989) Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, Berkeley: University of California Press.
5 See for instance: Arora, Balveer (2002) 'Political Parties and the Party System: The Emergence of New Coalitions', in Zoya Hasan (ed.), Parties and Party Politics in India, New Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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References

Electronic reference

« Indian elections 2009: Contests in Context », South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], Call for Papers, Online since 02 avril 2009, Connection on 21 novembre 2009. URL : http://samaj.revues.org/index2674.html

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