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Elections in India
Elections in India
Elections in India, the world's second-most populous country, evoke descriptions like 'spectacle'
or 'carnival,' in part due to the overwhelming numbers that participate in the process. In this
country of over a billion people, 714 million voters will decide who rules the world's largest
democracy for the next five years. In the 2004 elections, over 5,400 candidates from 230 political
parties participated. Nearly the same number of candidates will compete for seats in parliament
in 2009. Electoral candidates vie for votes by promising reforms, such as better governance,
greater socioeconomic equity, and bolstered efforts at poverty alleviation. However, corrupt
politicians with criminal records, caste- and religion-based politics, and allegations of vote-
buying continue to mar the democratic process. Meanwhile, the coalition politics of the last two
decades, while more inclusive, have resulted in giving outsized power to small parties that have
Indian historian Ramachandra Guha, in the book India after Gandhi, argues the country is
only "50 percent a democracy," holding viable elections, but falling short when it comes to
The Parliament
a legacy of British colonial rule. The Parliament is comprised of a bicameral legislature: the
Rajya Sabha, the 250-member upper house, where members are elected by state legislative
assemblies (12 members are nominated by the president), and the Lok Sabha, the 543-
member lower house directly elected by the people (with two additional seats reserved for
Anglo Indians nominated by the president). In the Lok Sabha, voters elect candidates based
on the electoral system where the person securing the largest number of votes in each district
wins.
"There were few other competing ideologies that allowed people to make sense of their social
To ensure political representation for historically marginalized groups in the lower house of
the parliament, the Indian Constitution stipulates that each state reserve seats for Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (formerly known as the untouchables, lowest in the country's
stratified social order) in proportion to their population in the state. This means only
candidates belonging to these groups can contest elections in reserved constituencies. In the
2009 elections, eighty-four seats for candidates from scheduled castes and forty-seven for
scheduled tribe members are reserved, 24 percent of the total seats in the parliament's lower
house. A pending bill seeking a 33 percent reservation for women in the parliament and state
legislatures has been the subject of intense debate for over a decade.
The prime minister is the leader of the party or alliance that enjoys majority support in the
lower house. If no single party or alliance has a majority, the leader of the largest single party
or alliance is appointed prime minister and must subsequently secure a vote of confidence
The Parties
Currently, India has hundreds of political parties registered (PDF) with the election
commission, and of these seven are registered as national parties. The Indian National
Congress and its rival the Bharatiya Janata Party are the largest among them.
British rule. Since India gained independence in 1947, the Congress Party has
formed most of India's governments. The party has been dominated by the
Nehru-Gandhi family and currently is led by Sonia Gandhi, the wife of former
go to Sonia's son Rahul. The party led the ruling United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) after the 2004 elections with Manmohan Singh as prime minister.
"Religion is part and parcel of Indian political life." – Sumit Ganguly, professor of political
previous Hindu political organizations, BJP has emerged as the main rival to
the Congress party. This Hindu nationalist party first formed the national
government in 1996 but failure to glean majority support in the lower house
led to its ouster in just a fortnight. It returned to power in 1998 and led the
Atal Behari Vajpayee at the helm until 2004. The party's prime ministerial
candidate for 2009 elections, Lal Krishna Advani, has been one of its most
• Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP): Formed in 1984 to represent the lower castes
Backward Classes (OBCs), and the religious minorities, the party has been
broadening its support base and fielding upper-caste and Muslim candidates in
recent elections. Its leader Mayawati is the chief minister of the country's most
populous state of Uttar Pradesh and has expressed ambitions to become a pan-
Indian leader. Experts say Mayawati could play a crucial role in coalition
negotiations and could even emerge as the country's first Dalit prime minister
Bardhan. The party was dealt a severe blow by a split in 1964 that resulted in
the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). CPI, along with CPI
(M), supported the UPA ruling coalition until July 2008 when the two parties
withdrew their support over the government's pursuit of a nuclear deal with
Maharashtra, the party was formed in 1999 after some of the top Congress
Party members broke away in protest at Sonia Gandhi's leadership. The party
is led by Sharad Pawar, who has served as Maharashtra's chief minister and as
agriculture minister under the Congress-led UPA that came to power in 2004.
• Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD): Formed in 1997 by Laloo Prasad Yadav, who
split from another regional party, the Janata Dal, RJD is primarily based in the
north Indian state of Bihar. Yadav became chief minister of Bihar in 1990 but
as the federal minister of railways in 2004 as part of the UPA. RJD is another
caste-based party that says it represents lower-caste Hindus and also enjoys
Besides the national parties, numerous regional movements play an important role in each
state. While many of them have yet to make a name for themselves among the voters, experts
say the influence of smaller regional parties has been growing steadily at a time when big
national parties are declining. "Given that Indian states can be large and populous, the term
For instance, he notes Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state, has 190 million people, rivaling
CFR's Senior Fellow Evan A. Feigenbaum, in a CFR.org interview, said the trend "has vast
implications for the ability of a party to push through a national program once it enters the
government." Guha adds that fractious multiparty-coalition politics offers "no meaningful
reform." Rangarajan writes that in general, these regional parties lean more toward rural than
urban voters. "Though not anti-reform, they would see welfare as contingent on more public
While result predictions for the Indian elections can be way off, most experts express little
doubt that 2009 elections will bring in another coalition--Congress-led UPA, BJP-led NDA,
When universal adult suffrage offered all social groups, including previously disenfranchised
ones, the right to vote, caste emerged as one of the most significant issues for political
mobilization. This, political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in the 2003 book The Burden
of Democracy, was in part because caste was "an axis of domination and subordination in
Indian society" and the state, by sanctioning categories of caste, provided the incentives to
mobilize. But he argues it was also because "there were few other competing ideologies that
allowed people to make sense of their social circumstances in the way caste did."
However, caste politics in the last three decades have been marked by desire for power rather
than a substantial agenda for social reform. Parties like BSP and RJD, which came to power
by mobilizing lower castes, have failed to offer much in the way of good governance or long-
term social transformation. Instead, once some lower-caste groups have gained access to
power, they have then sought to confine those privileges to their sub-caste. The problem,
though, is not the salience of caste in Indian politics, but the failure to address its underlying
causes and create new opportunities for marginalized groups, say some experts. "Unless the
newly mobilized Dalit castes can be given access to the gains of the market economy, their
prospects for social advancement remain dim," Mehta writes. Analysts note caste plays a
lesser role in urban India, and with higher urbanization, its role in electoral politics might
decline.
Many Indian historians date religion's role in Indian politics back to the colonial period and
the 1909 British policy of establishing separate electorates based on religion. However, in the
1980s, several events worked to bring religion to the forefront of electoral politics, say
experts: rising Sikh fundamentalism followed by anti-Sikh riots after the 1984 assassination
of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's decision to support
legislation that overturned a 1985 Supreme Court judgment to grant alimony to a Muslim
woman, seen by many as capitulation to Muslim orthodoxy in an election year; and the rise of
the BJP and its call to destroy the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. The dispute in Kashmir and
several bloody Hindu-Muslim flare-ups in the last two decades have further divided people
Today, both the Hindus and the country's 170 million Muslims, the largest minority group,
are courted energetically by political parties. "Religion is part and parcel of Indian political
life," says Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. He says the
BJP is the principal offender with its Hindutva agenda. But Congress is not free of culpability
either, he argues. Regional actors such as Maharashtra's Shiv Sena further exploit religion to
court voters. Ganguly says lack of leadership in upper echelons of the Muslim community
The Indian electorate has turned the standard law of political participation on its head.
While it is clear that religion plays a significant role, it is less clear how it translates into
India," writes Yogendra Yadav (BBC), a political scientist who designed and coordinated the
National Election Studies, the largest series of academic surveys of the Indian electorate,
from 1996 to 2004. He argues that "Muslims are fragmented along the lines of religion, sect,
caste, and community." Ganguly says economic issues are also intertwined with issues of
religion and caste. Indian Muslims, who experience high poverty rates, voted for Congress
for decades because of its secular platform and promised reforms. Unlike most minorities in
most democracies around the world, Indian Muslims, Yadav says, have not voted for Muslim
parties. Nor do they vote en bloc, "like, say, the black vote in the United States for the
Democratic Party or the UK's ethnic minorities who largely vote for the Labor Party," he
says.
experts. In India, the lower castes vote more than the upper castes, and the poor vote as much
or more often than the rich. Similarly, the illiterate cast ballots more often than the educated,
and rural voters more than urban populations. India's universal suffrage long preceded
professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007. And in this low-
income democracy, these large numbers of voters, most concerned with their basic needs and
The government's performance on economic issues, especially reform, since India moved
toward economic liberalization in 1991, has become important to electoral politics. Varshney
argues that "the economic reforms undertaken thus far have not been those that would
directly affect the lives of India's poor masses, and this has fed their resentment against the
reforms." As this Backgrounder points out, despite India's 7.5 percent average annual growth
rate since 1991, there is increasing rural-urban, sector-based, and income inequalities, and
benefits from growth have failed to trickle down to significant segments of the population.
Varshney says "political leaders will continue to find it extremely difficult to stake their
political fortunes on economic reforms that are expected to cause substantial short-term
dislocations and are likely to produce rewards only in the long term."
High levels of corruption and poor governance have led to immense civil society
mobilization seeking greater accountability from political candidates and reform of the
electoral process. In 2004 general elections, candidates were required to disclose their assets
and criminal records for the first time under new rules pushed for by ordinary citizens. In the
2004 election, the disclosures seemed to have little impact on the increasing criminalization
of politics: 128 of the 543 winners had faced criminal charges (Newsweek), including eighty-
four cases of murder, seventeen cases of robbery, and twenty-eight cases of theft and
extortion.
Ahead of the 2009 elections, a nationwide campaign, led by more than a thousand NGOs and
citizen groups working on electoral reforms, sought more transparency. Primary among their
demands were barring candidates with criminal charges, the voters' right to reject all the
candidates through a "none of the above" option on the ballot paper, and greater transparency