Book Review: Suhas Palshikar, K.C. Suri and Yogendra Yadav, eds, Party Competition in Indian States
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023015575229 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Suhas Palshikar, K.C. Suri and Yogendra Yadav, eds, Party Competition in Indian States. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press. 2014. 592 pages. `1,445.
The wealth of survey research and analysis on elections that has emerged from the Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) has been put together in one accessible volume focused on
the 2009 elections by political scientists Suhas Palshikar, Yogendra Yadav and others. Although the 2009
re-election of the Indian National Congress (INC) may now seem like a modest shift in comparison with
the drama of the 2014 election, many analysts at the time saw it as a transformational event. For the first
time in ‘twenty-five years, a government that had completed its full term got reelected; Manmohan
Singh became the first Prime Minister since Nehru to have been reinstalled after completing one full
term’ (p. 44). Political commentators concluded that the outcome indicated a significant nationwide shift
in political preferences in favour of national, as opposed to regional, parties.
All this amounted to ‘trying to explain a national wave for Congress that simply did not exist’ (p. 46),
argue the authors. A closer analysis of the data shows, they contend, that the 2009 election was more a
continuation of the ‘post-Congress’ polity in which contingent political developments at last favoured
the INC, than any fundamental change in political preferences. Furthermore, the more informative ques-
tion is not why the United Progress Alliance (UPA) was re-elected in 2009, but what the framework of
competitive politics was that returned the UPA to power. Specifically, ‘How do state electoral outcomes
relate to and impact upon the national outcome (and vice versa)?’ (p. 40). The authors identify this level
of analysis as located in ‘the middle ground of political causality’ (p. 47), between the deep structures
beloved of social scientists and the strategic manoeuvres that are usually the focus of media analysts.
One of these contexts is, naturally, state politics. As Palshikar, Suri and Yadav point out in the intro-
duction to the volume, survey data show that the number of voters in 2009 for whom state government
performance was the primary motivation to vote was two-thirds greater than those for whom the central
government was more important: this compares with equal numbers in both categories in 2004 (Table
I.1, p. 4), suggesting that state considerations gained in importance in 2009. State party competition
remained fragmented and the major national parties, the INC and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), con-
tinued to compete for a combined national vote share of about 50 per cent (although in retrospect this
point may have been overstated: the two parties won the same combined percentage of the vote in 2014,
but the BJP still managed to reach a majority on its own).
It was this context that set the stage for the UPA’s re-election. In Chapter 1, Yadav and Palshikar
strongly argue that contingent externalities had as much a role in the UPA’s victory as party political
choices. Three elements favoured the UPA: (a) a modest increase in votes for the INC together with a
sharp drop in BJP votes, (b) a major loss of allies for the BJP that enlarged the gap between the UPA and
the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and (c) an increase in INC votes that yielded ‘a disproportion-
ately large share of seats in some key states where it was pitted against the BJP or against the Left’
Studies in Indian Politics
3(1) 134–147
© 2015 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023015575229
http://inp.sagepub.com
To continue reading
Request your trial