Election Almanac

Politics in India are elections, and everything in politics depends on polling results. All parties and candidates, with a few notable exceptions, are hugely invested in the election process to the exclusion of values, morality, ethics, expense and the welfare of the electorate. Few candidates have engaged in any profession other than politics, and when they have done so, even fewer have made any notable success in it. At the same time, the world’s attention is also riveted, with amazement and admiration, on the Indian elections.

Chambers, known for works of reference and information since 1872, has published a timely book on the election history and process in India from the second half of the nineteenth century to 2023. The data and text have been compiled by Kingshuk Chatterjee, a professor at Calcutta University and Surbek Biswas, a journalist in the Times of India group. They rightly claim this work is different from others because it focuses specifically on elections, and “that the Indian polity resoundingly manages to qualify as a democracy is largely because of the unwavering regularity with which elections have been held in India except for a brief period during the Emergency” [21 months from 1975-77] and “comprises the largest electorate constituting a representative government.”

The authors restrict themselves to the direct elections to the nation and the states’ lower houses, which omit the elections of the president and vice-president, the upper houses of nation and states, and those polls at the local level like municipal, village and district, because to include those would have necessitated several additional volumes.

This book is divided into three segments, the domination of the Congress Party from 1952 to 1977, a period of political fragmentation from 1977 to 1999 and the rise and ascendency of the BJP from 1999 onwards. Elections are dominated by parties and individuals; both are given significance, with the individuals “being situated in the larger landscape of politics within which they operate.” This book traces the route of the Congress, which began as a nation-wide presence and progressively shrank in various parts of India. And yet, “neither Congress nor the BJP has so far dominated all the states at one time, let alone at all times,” and regional parties have always presented a strong challenge to hegemonic centralism. To that extent, “India truly lives in its regions” and regional dynamics are important.

In the first period covered (1952-77) India’s prime minister during the 1951-52 election travelled over 25,000 miles, by air, train, car and boat. “Nehru travelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelled,” addressing “close to 20 million people directly”. We need to recall that the scars of Partition were only four years old when at the very outset of his campaign Nehru declared an “all-out war against communalism”, laying the basis for a secular India. Ironically, BR Ambedkar, recognised as the architect of the Indian Constitution, lost the election to the lower house twice in 1952 and 1954 due to communist opposition, though he was elected to the upper house from Bombay.

The second largest party to the Congress in 1952 was the Communist Party, which had once opposed the freedom movement and stated that independence in 1947 was not real because the public did not gain independence from poverty. The first democratically elected Communist Party in the world in Kerala in 1957 was dismissed in 1959, having survived only 28 months, on the issue of agitations against a proposed government take-over of private education. This, despite the Kerala government having introduced in a short time reforms in industry, public distribution, agriculture, health, social security, police and administration.

The election of 1967 first introduced a new feature that was to endure—violence and protests. “Till then,” write the authors, “such conduct was unprecedented—later it became almost a routine.” From 1964 to 1967, India had three prime ministers with home minister Gulzarilal Nanda being sworn in twice for 13 days each time, as interim prime minister between Nehru’s death and Shastri, and between Shastri’s demise and Indira Gandhi. Nanda has been the only interim prime minister in India.  In the latter case, Indira Gandhi, a member of the Rajya Sabha, was challenged by Morarji Desai, which led to the only secret-ballot election within a party to decide who would be prime minister. Gandhi was sworn in 1966, and remains the only female premier to date.

From 1974 Jayaprakash Narayan entered the stage with his movement toppling the Congress government in Gujarat, which showed “that public rage could overthrow an elected government even though it had a thumping majority in the legislative house.” The background to the Emergency is examined in forensic detail, with LN Mishra being the first cabinet minister to be assassinated in January 1975 in Bihar. Following Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, the 1977 elections revealed the absence of a divide between the rural and urban voter, though the impact of the Emergency was “felt mainly by the urban people”. North of the Narmada, the opposition prevailed, but the south was a face-saver for Congress and “It indicated a strange dichotomy in Indian politics.” Indira Gandhi was unrepentant in defeat, saying the Emergency had been the right decision and had saved India.

The period 1977 to 1999 showed early hints of the Congress decline. After Gandhi’s huge victory in 1980, Sanjay Gandhi and his Youth Congress were the architects of Congress victories in eight of nine state elections. But after Sanjay’s death, it looked as if Indira was losing her grip when she was assassinated in 1984. After Rajiv Gandhi was challenged by VP Singh during the Bofors commissions scandal, a new rigour in elections was introduced by TN Seshan as chief election commissioner. He promulgated a list of 150 election malpractices and purged the voters’ roll of false names by introducing the voter card. He dramatically reduced election malpractice and placed the Election Commission’s prestige on a high pedestal. Such was his integrity that the political establishment paid him the back-handed compliment of giving him no extension in office, no sinecure, no seat in any legislature.

The book notes J Pal’s tenure of 40 hours as UP chief minister in 1998 as the shortest ever, but most likely this has been overtaken by the shenanigans of Governor BS Koshyari to favour BJP in Maharashtra in recent times. Also noted is how the Kargil War came to help Vajpayee and the BJP in the interlude between elections after Vajpayee had been defeated in parliament and was a lame duck in office.

In 1998 Sonia Gandhi became president of the Congress, the sixth of non-Indian origin and first since 1947. The revolt by Sharad Pawar, PA Sangma and others created a rival Nationalist Congress, which dented the Congress hold in Maharashtra. Nevertheless, 1999 marked Sonia Gandhi’s electoral debut. The BJP came to power in that election but the ‘India Shining’ mood in cities was not reflected in the countryside— “the growth story of urban India was not matched by the continued agrarian distress and rural backwardness.” This was evident in the Andhra state election in 2004 where the tech-friendly chief minister Naidu lost. The authors write, “Probably for the first time in Indian poll history, the gloomy scenario in the agricultural sector resulting in the suicide of farmers ousted a party from government.”

Meanwhile, Congress decided on a new strategy to forge coalitions; when it fell short of a majority it reached out to the Left, which in 2004 recorded its best-ever performance. Though winning again in 2009, the public mood with Congress turned sour with three major corruption cases—the Commonwealth Games, 2-G, and Coal allotments, which gave rise to Anna Hazare’s movement for an ombudsman to enforce probity. But Hazare had his own agenda; it seemed his main target was the Congress, since he openly praised Narendra Modi in Gujarat and Nitish Kumar in Bihar and so “the impact of his movement was altogether political.”

Several months prior to the 2014 elections, the BJP chose Modi as its prime ministerial candidate; no non-Congress party had ever announced its candidate so far ahead of the vote. From September 2013 to February 2014 Modi canvassed across the country, but “for the landslide victory …credit should also go to Prashant Kishor…the first ever professional election strategist and tactician in India.” The authors note wryly that Rahul Gandhi started campaigning when Modi had already taken a sizeable lead in reaching out to people, and in 2019 he lost the Amethi seat to “a soap opera actress turned politician”.

The book notes that among female politicians in India, very few rose without family connections or a powerful patron. The exception is Mamata Banerjee, “the firebrand leader from West Bengal,” who in 2011 put an end to the 34-year long Leftist rule in the state. Sworn in as chief minister, Banerjee was re-elected in 2016 and 2021. She is, however, nowhere near the tenure of Pawan Chamling who was chief minister of Sikkim from 1994 to 2019 for 24 years and 165 days, but Naveen Patnaik will overtake Chamling once he completes his current fifth term in Odisha.

The book engages the reader with curiosities. In the 2009 election there were two chief election commissioners who conducted the poll, N Gopalaswami and Navin Chawla. The former sought the removal of the latter on account of being too close to Congress, but President Patil unsurprisingly rejected that recommendation. The world’s highest polling station is at Tashigang Himachal Pradesh at 15,256 feet. In 2014 the BJP candidate Gopinath Munde won a by-election at Beed by 6.9 lakh votes, the highest in Indian history. The first and only referendum in India in 1967 decided that Goa was not to be merged with Maharashtra.

Of interest to the non-politically minded reader are the final chapters of each of the three segments, which summarise the salient but little-known aspects of the elections. The authors claim to keep facts uppermost and their analysis “at a minimum”, but happily there is enough appropriate subjectivity and penetrative deconstruction to make this work significant and noteworthy is a clinical dissection of various internal party splits.

There are some needless duplications in the text, some unorthodox use of syntax, the occasional typo and an incomplete Index, but this work presents an excellent narrative of Indian political history with appropriate scene-setting as background both in the domestic and international spheres. The jacket cover describes this book as “fascinating and useful.” It is both. A similar exegesis of the current election exercise in India will be eagerly awaited.

About The Author

Krishnan Srinivasan

Krishnan Srinivasan is a former foreign secretary and the author of both fiction and non-fiction books