The 1967 Indian Election: Patterns of Party Regularity and Defection

Abstract

o almost everyone, even scholarly observers in the field, the results of the 1967 Indian national election were startling. Although one could sense that change was in the air, the magnitude and nature of the upset was unexpected. The dominance which the Congress Party had maintained for 20 years was broken; key establishment leaders including the party president, Kamaraj, were defeated; non-Congress governments were formed in eight states (governing two-thirds of the Indian population); and the Congress dropped from 73.1% of the seats in the Lok Sahba (lower house of Parliament) to 54.6%a loss of 81 seats. Faced with these sensational developments pundits and scholars alike advanced a spate of theories and explanations of -the election, some carefully reasoned, others less cautious and more speculative. At the level of parliament and government the basic argument has been concerned with whether or not the evidence from the election indicates that Congress government has been repudiated and what the meaning of the election is with respect to the emergence of new leadership, new policy, new power relationships, new legislative party roles. At the level of the electorate the argument has concerned the question of whether a new alignment in voting behavior is occurring, linked to new social and political forces, an alignment which augurs the demise of the one party dominant system, possibly the disintegration of Congress itself, and the rise of stronger non-Congress parties and new party coalitions at the national as well as at the state level. As the Economic and Political Weekly put the question, is this a deepening political crisis or a passing phase? As the student of critical elections would put it, is this a realigning election with a basic shift in party loyalties and voting behavior or only a deviating election? It