The 1971 Revolution in Indian Voting Behavior

Abstract

7he most interesting and important questions about the Indian Parliamentary Elections of 1971 do not deal simply with what happened in the election, but rather with how voting patterns changed between the 1967 elections-or subsequent elections in several of the states-and those of 1971. What parties did voters desert to give Mrs. Gandhi the impressive 43.64% of the vote that produced 68% of the seats for the Congress (R) ? How much of her victory was a product of the failure of Congress (0) to perform as well as most observers expected? What share of the defections from Congress (0), the Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP) and the Swatantra Party was due to the alliance which those parties formed with the more communalminded Jan Sangh? To what extent did the swing of Muslim and scheduled caste voters to Congress (R) account for the party's victory? To provide answers to these questions one must compare the results of the 1971 election with previous elections. Valid comparisons are extremely hard to make, however, because the basic parameters of the election situation invariably change quite substantially from one election to another in India. Two types of changes create the greatest problems for the analyst. First, the patterns of candidacy are different for each election. Not only the total number of candidates, but the distribution of those candidates among the parties often changes quite radically from one election to the next. Since the percentage of Jan Sangh candidates dropped from 10.5% in 1967 to 5.6% in 1971, we learn very little from the fact that the party's share of the vote declined from 9.3% to 7.5%. We need to know how much of that decline was due to the reduced number of Jan Sangh candidates and how much to a real loss in voter support. Or did, in fact, the Jan Sangh gain voter support? One must put the 1967 voting figures in terms that are comparable to those of 1971 in order to find out. The second problem complicating the comparison of Indian elections is that new political parties appear in most elections and the party structure of the earlier election must be adjusted accordingly. Of most obvious im-