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Book review: Eswaran Sridharan, Elections, Parties, and Coalitions in India: Theory and Recent History

Document Cited in Related
Published date01 December 2024
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/23210230241289447
AuthorAbhinav Pankaj Borbora
Date01 December 2024
Book Reviews 359
Eswaran Sridharan, Elections, Parties, and Coalitions in India: Theory and Recent History. Permanent Black.
359 pages. `1095.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230241289447
Eswaran Sridharan’s latest book, published in 2024, collects 10 of his papers, with themes pertaining to
elections, political parties and coalitions in India. Two of these are co-authored with Adnan Farooqui and
one with Milan Vaishnav. All the papers previously appeared in different academic journals and edited
volumes.
The book opens with a paper that explores the origins of India’s electoral system, a subject that has
hitherto received little attention. Analysing Constituent Assembly and early parliamentary debates, the
author reveals the absence of any sustained debate on alternative electoral systems.
The first-past-the-post system (FPTP) was adopted almost by default. Sridharan considers the
provision of legislative reservations for marginal groups as an indication that members nonetheless
recognized the need for balancing its tendency to favour larger communities. The author however
contends that opting for some variant of proportional representation (PR) would have served their
objective of instituting a fairer scheme of representation more effectively.
In the paper ‘Class Voting in the 2014 Lok Sabha Election’, the author tries to account for the large
shift of the middle class towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He is however unable to do so
comprehensively beyond establishing, on the basis of survey data, that the swing was not induced by
communal motivations or economic hardships experienced by voters. The paper on the 2019 election is
also devoted to analysing class-wise voting patterns. In it, the author tries to account for the considerable
similarity in the voting preferences of lower, poor, middle and rich segments in that election. The author
however only finds limited evidence suggesting that the convergence was partly due to emphasis placed
by voters on strong leadership, effective welfare schemes and aspirational class identification.
In the paper ‘Can Umbrella Parties Survive?’, Sridharan and Farooqui analyse the future prospects of
the Congress. The authors frame the challenge in terms of the increasing politicization of social cleavages
and emergence of strong competitors across states. They argue that both tendencies have cut into its
composite electoral base. But the question of survival is addressed somewhat superficially, with the
authors almost tautologically suggesting that survival is contingent on the Congress re-building a broad
social coalition. In their other paper in the volume, the authors explain how Indian parties select
candidates for Lok Sabha elections. Using interviews and analysis of candidate profiles, the authors
identify three factors—election timing, institutionalization of selection process, and party type—that
determine who secures party nomination. The paper complements the broader literature through the
analysis of certain types of parties that have not been adequately considered. Notable among them are
caste-based parties that have been found to enjoy greater autonomy regarding nominations due to their
assured voter bases.
The paper by Sridharan and Vaishnav considers the problem of unaccounted funding of Indian parties.
From the 1969 ban on corporate funding to the introduction of (now scrapped) Electoral Bonds in 2017, the
authors identify developments that turned political financing opaque. They observe that despite some
improvement in the situation more effective reforms are not quite forthcoming. The authors ingeniously
explain the paucity of such initiatives by framing it as a collective order problem whose resolution requires
incentivizing both donors and parties to become transparent. This comes across as a more pragmatic approach
to bring greater transparency in political financing compared to arguments that invoke public interest.

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