Enduring another election

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 19-20

  Kohli, Atul ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 24944557708     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1998.0047     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. This simplification can be misleading in two senses. First, the labels "left" and "right" do not always make much sense in contemporary India. And second, each of the three main groups has numerous, disparate parties under its umbrella, many of which are ready to switch sides at any time. Nearly 40 political parties currently have seats in the Indian Parliament. Of these, 30 have fewer than 10 seats each (10 parties have a single seat apiece). Even specialists in Indian politics cannot keep all these parties straight, and often find it difficult to anticipate the variety of alliances that may evolve.
2. I provided a somewhat more detailed analysis of past political trends in India in these pages at an earlier date. See Atul Kohli, "Indian Democracy: Stress and Resilience," Journal of Democracy 3 (January 1992): 52-64.
3. For much more detailed scholarly treatments of the subject, especially of Congress's decline, see Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
4. Paul Brass, India Since Independence (2nd. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
5. and Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
6. Studies of the BJP include Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
7. and Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987).
8. For historical background, see Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
9. Having made strategic alliances with a number of regional parties, the BJP in 1998 contested 383 seats, compared to 471 in 1996.
10. For such an interpretation of the BJP, see Amrita Basu, The Lotus and the Trishul: The Bhartiya Janata Party and the Growth of Hindu Nationalism (forthcoming).
11. See the leading news magazine India Today, 16 March 1998, 33-35. One problem is that this data may only be capturing the fact that many of the BJP's allies have their core support among the OBCs in one state or another. Without readily available state-by-state data, it remains hard to tell whether the BJP's own support among the OBCs in the Hindi-heartland states actually went up or not, and if it did, by how much. One piece of evidence that raises doubts about whether the OBC vote in states like UP shifted to the BJP is the good performance of regional parties generally associated with the OBCs. Thus the share of Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party in UP actually went up - from 20.7 percent in 1996 to 28.8 percent in 1998.
12. One apparent exception to this was the electoral loss suffered by the DMK party in Tamil Nadu; however, this was not so much of an exception if one keeps in mind that the DMK lost to another regional party, the AIADMK associated with Jayalalitha.
13. This was a central theme of my Democracy and Discontent, cited in note 2 above.