Democracy, Voting Systems and thoughts on opinion polls

The last couple of months has been the season of opinion polls. Psephologists, astrologers and sundry television experts have been trying to foresee the results of the election. There has been a lot of controversy as well about the veracity of these opinion polls, with questions being raised on how these polls are conducted and funded. It is rather intuitive that results of opinion polls can have a prejudicial impact on voting, but it seemed that the effect is even stronger in the 'first past the post' voting system that we use vis-a-vis proportional representation systems used in other democracies. Suffice to say that I started off with the rather simple intent of finding more about opinion polls, how they are conducted and the nature of their impact on voter behavior only to come to the conclusion that some basic understanding of the theory of democracy would be necessary before going any forward. It is evidently a very deep subject, and the idea is to skim it at a sufficiently high level.

The graphic below describes the different forms of government based on the source of power and the system of governance

A deeper understanding of the differences and the pros and cons of these forms of democracy is both interesting and important given the current debate in the country. When the 'aam aadmi'  proclaims the the demand for 'poorna swaraj', at the face of it, what they seem to be asking for is direct democracy. Similarly there have been strong currents which give this current election the look of a presidential race. Our founding fathers chose the current form of government after much deliberation - perhaps better understanding of these reasons is needed, before we even consider quick remedies.

Within representative democracy there are multiple voting systems which are essentially different methods that voters can use to make a choice between options.The figure below details out some of the most prevalent ones

Again since the first past the post system is what is followed in this country it perhaps makes sense to get deeper into some of its  pitfalls. Some of the strongest criticism of the FPTP system is that it encourages tactical voting - where voters have the incentive to vote for one who they believe is likely to win, though they might have preferred someone else so as not to 'waste' their vote. In essence in the first past the post system voters optimize between preference and winnability. Examples of tactical voting can be seen across multiple elections in India - So in UP across multiple state elections now the Brahmans have voted tactically for BSP even though their preferred party is the BJP, and in the recent Delhi state elections many people did not vote for the AAP because they did not want to 'waste' their vote on a party that has little chance of winning.

This is where the media and opinion polls have the potential to have a particularly insidious effect. By creating a halo effect and a buzz that a certain party is winning, a serious disincentive is created to vote for anyone other than the winner or the next serious contender. In a FPTP system the media and opinion polls can influence the way individuals think, by creating a perception of what the collective is thinking , and eventually change the way the collective will act by influencing the individuals that make it, kind of like a self fulfilling prophesy.

An example will perhaps come in handy. Lets consider a voter in UP whose first preference is the BSP but has voted for the BJP in the past. If the media and opinion polls convince him that there is a wave in favor of the BJP, this person is likely to switch allegiance so as to not let is vote get wasted. Entire communities can switch tactically in a similar way. The caveat here is that this can work both ways, for example now if we consider a typical SP voter who has a strong aversion for the BJP - the perception for such a wave may make him vote tactically for the party most likely to beat them and hence have the effect of consolidating the opposition.

Apart from the effect of the perception created by media and opinion polls on voter behavior which prima facie does not look very desirable, it perhaps makes sense to take a look at the success rate of these polls. "Not very good" should sum it up. Multiple times in the recent past these opinion polls have gone horribly wrong, most notably in 2004. India is in some sense, a psephologists dream and worst nightmare rolled into one. As a democracy it is incredibly large, diverse and complex. Just to get a large enough sample that can represent the 800 odd million voters is a challenge in the first place, and a sampling error is introduced right there. The other big challenge is to convert the vote shares to seats. Given the multi-party nature of the contest more than half the constituencies see multi-cornered contests where simple mathematical approximations like rule of cubes do not apply.  Other measures like index of opposition unity sound obsolete given that its premise is that of the Congress as the default party of choice, something that most people will agree is not true this time.  Then, the dynamic is very different in each of the states and even within some of the larger ones, with multiple political parties and myriad castes and sub castes. So even with the most honest intentions and the best tools and methodologies it is still something like gazing into a crystal ball.

What has been a bit disturbing in the last couple of months has been the finality and the confidence with which these have been presented. As if the results have been declared already on the news channels. Some humility is called for especially given the track record. Caveats need to be stated candidly, explicitly and frequently especially given the possibility of influencing outcomes in our electoral system. Then again, has this country not seen this movie before, maybe caveats are not needed.

Snapshots - 30 years and 10 elections in 30 seconds

 As countries go, India is a relatively young, 67 years is not a long time, and throughout its short and checkered history scholars  have wondered what keeps this teeming multitude of people from various religions, castes and races, speaking hundreds of languages and living in diverse regions together. Our democracy comes up as a central ingredient of this 'idea of India', that invisible glue that keeps this country going. Time and again, it has proved to be a strong barrier against fundamentalist forces of different kinds and at the same time an effective pressure valve for expression of dissent. It showed that it has the strength to defend itself  and fight back when emergency was imposed by Indira Gandhi and over the years it has grown in maturity, adding layer upon layer of character and complexity to itself, to get more in tune with the aspirations of its people. 

Undoubtedly democracy has been the single most potent driving force for the destiny of India and even a quick look of general election results can say much about the politics of the times. The graphic below shows the results of the the last 10 Lok Sabha elections spread between 1977 and 2009 (click on the < and > links to scroll across elections). The colors represent primary political formations as represented in the legend.

Learn About Tableau

The Elections of 1977 marked the end of one of the most turbulent times in Indias history. Article 352, was invoked by Indira Gandhi to impose a state of internal emergency in 1975, bestowing upon her the authority to rule by decree, to suspend elections and curb civil liberties. This was vigorously opposed by various sections of society and forces across the political spectrum who cobbled together a hasty alliance (Janta Alliance) when elections were announced by Indira Gandhi in 1977. This motley group included JP's left leaning Socialist Party, Communists, Charan Singhs Bharatiya Lok Dal, the right leaning Jan Sangh and some old hands from Congress(O) thrown in for good measure. Such was the unpopularity of the emergency and draconian curbs imposed on the opposition and  press that came with it that this hastily formed alliance delivered a crushing blow to the congress winning 298 of the 543 seats. The blanket of green over almost the entire North India shows the magnitude of the defeat. The Congress could not manage even a single seat in all of Bihar and UP (even Indira Gandhi lost here seat) and managed only solitary seats from Madhya Pradesh(Chhindwara) and Rajasthan(Nagaur). 1977 was the first time when  non congress government, led by Morarjee Desai came to power in the center. More significantly the seeds of anti Congressism as a viable political ideology has been sown in large parts of the country. 

The Janta government was India's first experiment with coalition politics, but  it was not built to last. The government crumbled under the burden of the the ideological differences and personal ambitions of its constituents and fresh elections were called for in 1980. The Janta alliance or whatever remained of it was decimated in this election. The countries first non Congress government had failed and the split and rudderless opposition watched as much of north India scurried back to the Congress. Although the Janta constituents did maintain some of their hold in UP and Bihar, the Congress regained much of the lost ground.

The 1984 elections were held right after the assassination of  Indira Gandhi. The shocked nation voted under the influence of a massive sympathy wave giving the congress a whooping 80% majority with 416 seats. Only small pockets of resistance remained in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. In fact the Telegu Desam party emerged as the second largest and hence the principal opposition party. Regionalism in Indian politics had arrived. Also in the list of arrivals was the BJP which made its debut with 2 seats (Mehsana and Hanamkonda)

In the run-up to the elections of 1989  the bofors scandal became the rallying point for anti Congress parties to join forces. The national front was formed by combining VP Singh's Janta Dal with regional parties like the DMK, TDP and AGP. Further seat sharing with BJP and the Left front led to consolidation of the anti congress vote. As a result the congress was significantly weakned down to 197 seats and the National front formed a government led by VP Singh with outside support from the BJP and the Left front. This election saw the return of anti-Congressism in the same areas where its seeds had been planted in 1977. While the Janta Dal took much of UP and Bihar, the BJP registered strong performances in MP, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The other similarity in the results of 1977 and 1989 was the Congress's strong performance south of the Vindhyas, to counterbalance its rout in the north.

This second experiment with a non-congress government also ended in a failure, just like the first one, and just like the first one the ideological contradictions of the constituents and the personal ambitions of the leaders were to blame for another round of elections in 1991. Meanwhile in his short term VP Singh had implemented the Mandal Commision report (giving 27% reservation to OBC's) while the BJP was busy stoking the smoldering fires of the Ramjanmabhoomi Babri masjid dispute. The first phase of this election was fought over mandal and masjid, but Rajiv Gandhis assasination midway through the election changed everything. The resulting sympathy wave let to the Congress sweeping the constituencies where polling was held in the second phase, and ultimately forming a government under the leadership of PV Narasimha Rao. This election led to the emergence of the BJP as the principal opporition party for the first time with 120 seats.

Three elections were held in quick succession in 1996, 1998 and 1999. Mandal and Masjid continued to be dominant themes across the politics of much of the 1990's. The other common theme across all three elections was the gradual rise of the BJP as it made attempts to form a government at the center, moving first to 162 in 1996, 182 in 1998, when they led two minority governments for 13 days and 13 months respectively and then finally getting their alliances right in 1999 to form an NDA government.  The A B Vajpayee led NDA government was the first non-congress government to complete a full term in office. Meanwhile the Congress stock deteriorated to 140 before finally reaching their all time low of 114 seats in 1999.

The Vajpayee led NDA government was not only the first non-Congress government to successfully complete its term, it was also the first successful experiment with the coalition model. The first blows were felt in the run-up to the 2004 elections itself as the NC  and DMK left the alliance - the latter to join the Congress led UPA. The Congress was quick to emulate Vajpayee's coalition model and the 2004 election was a battle of alliances. In the crucial swing states of Andhra pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Bihar the UPA decisively beat the NDA. For the NDA this was further exacerbated by their bad performance in UP. Ultimately the Congress led UPA formed the  government led by Manmohan Singh which won another election successfully  in 2009

To sum it up, when we look at it in the longer term we see a gradual move to highly distributed mandates where no party can realistically aim to form a government on their own and alliances are the key.  

Over this time the mantle of the principal opposition has come to reside with the center-right BJP.  The ideological inheritors of the socialism of JP and Karpoori Thakur, the surviving fragments of the janta party, have got contained both geographically and ideologically.Today RJD, JD(U), SP and JD(S) are all regional players primarily identified with the politics of identity.
 
The politics of identity has also given birth to parties like BSP which started from rather humble beginnings to establish themselves on the national scene. The story has been a little different for the left parties. At one time they had pockets of influence across the country, and apart from their traditional strongholds in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, used to win elections regularly in the naxal belts of central Bihar (Jehanabad, Balia, Nalanda, Buxar) and Andhra (Bhadrachalam, Nalgonda, Miryalguda). It does seem that their influence as a national party is on the vane. Lastly the seeds of regionalism planted by NTR and MGR are finally bearing fruit.  if anything regional parties are gaining in importance and look likely to play a larger role in the age of coalitions.



 

2009 - A prelude to the big one

Five years is a long time in Indian politics. Still, as we try to look at potential scenarios for 2014 General Elections it makes sense to look back and try to understand what happened in the last general elections in 2009. Apart from being the most recent elections, It is also the only election after the delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies in 2007. As a result of that exercise, constituency boundaries were redrawn for almost all the major states, and in all 499 of the 543 constituencies were newly delimited. In terms of the voting demographic by constituency, 2009 is the closest comparable that we have for analysis.

The election in 2009 was unique in a number of ways. It was perhaps the first election in the history of India where both the incumbent as well as the principal opposition has a "prime ministerial candidate" announced before the poll. If anything, this trend towards a "presidential style" contest has got stronger in 2014 and seems to be here to stay.

Learn About Tableau

The Indian National Congress emerged as the single largest party with 205 seats, with the UPA tantalizingly close to a majority with  262 seats. UPA(II) was able to form the government easily with unconditional support of BSP, SP, JD(S) and a host of smaller parties. Manmohan Singh was elected as leader of the congress legislative party and sworn in as the Prime Minister for his second term. Significantly, he is only the second prime minister (after Jawahar Lal Nehru) to have been elected to a second term after completing the full first term (5 years). Even Indira Gandhi did not have that honor. He went on to complete 2 successive terms, another feat that none other than Nehru has achieved. He is also holds the dubious distinction of the longest serving prime minister to have have never been elected to the Lok Sabha.

Learn About Tableau

In terms of states, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal were the game changers for the Congress. In AP the Congress repeated their performance in 2004 by winning 33 of the 42 constituencies, partly helped by a split between the TDP and the BJP. It was UP though where the Congress put up arguably its best performance. For this state which returns 80 MP's and from where Congress has returned with as low as 0 in the not so distant past, even 21 seats is no mean achievement. In the process it returned as the second largest party in the state and relegated the BJP to no 4 with only 10 seats. Just to understand the significance of this, if we compare between 1998 (BJP-57 and Congress-0) and 2009 (BJP 10, Congress-21), UP itself constituted a divergence of 68 seats between the two parties. It is small wonder that UP is the centerpiece of BJP's strategy for 2014, starting from nomination of Amit Shah to lead electioneering in the state, to Modi's nomination from Varanasi and the parties focus as reflected by the number of Modi rallies. Truly, the road to Delhi goes through UP.

The graphic below shows the geographic distribution of seats won by various parties across the country. The large swathes of blue across much of the country show that though driven by its performance in these three states, the Congress did well largely across the country. On the other hand, apart from Bihar and Karnataka, the BJP/NDA did not emerge as a walkaway winner in any of the major states. Unlike the congress the BJP fights the election from a much smaller base, it is virtually absent from much of southern and north eastern india and has had only a token presence in West Bengal. So it does rely on an above average performance in the North and west India and that did not happen in 2009. Its performance was not out of the ordinary  even in states like MP and Gujarat, where the party had won handsomely in successive election. It is indeed telling that Karnataka, the new orange kid in the block, was the largest state in terms of seats for the BJP.

Learn About Tableau

The pro-poor rights centric policies of UPA(I) are given a lot of credit for this performance of the Congress in 2009. This is probably true to a large extent for states like Andhra Pradesh, where the party was able to demonstrate results on the back of execution by congress led state government but it still does not explain the huge success that the Congress had in urban/semi urban areas. For example as one can see in the graphic above (use the magnify icon to zoom into areas) the Congress swept all the 7 seats in both Delhi and Mumbai whereas in Kolkata, its ally the Trinamool congress did likewise. This was coupled with strong performances with its allies in Chennai and Hyderabad. This is even more significant given that the primary opponent the BJP with its right wing economic leanings has had a strong base in urban areas for a while. From the looks of it, it is in urban India that the Congress struck a killer blow to BJP's aspirations in 2009.

This election was the first time since 1991 that a national party won more than 200 seats (even the Congress's strong show in 1991 was on the back of a strong 'sympathy wave' after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination). Some analysts saw  in this a retreat of regionalism in Indian politics and signs of consolidation towards a two party system that most democracies that follow the 'first past the post' system tend to converge towards. However prima facie this does not seem to be true. If anything, as per the graphic below, just in terms of percentage of valid votes the regional parties are stronger than they have ever been. This is covered in great detail in a fantastic analysis of the 2009 results by Balveer Arora and Stéphanie Tawa here

Learn About Tableau

Lastly, before we start making conclusions about 2014 based on 2009, it needs to be emphasized that in terms of context (social and political) and coalition dynamics these two elections could not be more different. The Congress led UPA alliance entered the election on the back of five reasonably successful years in office. Through flagship programs like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREGA), the farm loan waiver program, the Right To Infromation (RTI) act and OBC reservations the UPA had done its bit to appeal to various sections of society, and Manmohan Singh had asserted his authority by getting the Indo-US nuclear deal passed inspite of resistance from his communist allies and having to face a no confidence motion.The UPA had strong alliances in the electorally significant states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal and a strong incumbent government in Andhra Pradesh. On the other hand the NDA was in tatters - important partners in  electorally significant states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu had left, leaving the BJP all but inconsequential in these states and even some of the existing allies like the Shiv Sena had been weakened by splits (with MNS forming). On the leadership front the BJP seemed to be a party run by a bunch of bickering  'Rajya Sabha types' with little popular base. Advani himself was a pale shadow of his former self and seemed to have exhausted all IOU's earned over a long career to become the party's prime ministerial candidate.
 
Cut to 2014 and the context cannot be more different - The UPA comes into this election having endured 5 tumultuous years in office, completed only because of the reluctance of others to bring the government down. This term has been bogged by countless corruption scandals brought to the forefront of the national consciousness, first by a movement led by civil society and later by its offshoot the Aam Aadmi Party.  It has lost ally after ally in the last few years and enters this election in very much the listless way as the BJP did in 2009. It does not have any significant allies in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and its prospects in Andhra Pradesh, its strongest state in 2009 seem dim, owing largely to its mishandling of the creation of Telengana. In contrast the BJP and the NDA seem to have got a lot of their mojo back -largely because of the dismal performance of the current government but also partly with Narendra Modi barging his way to become the PM candidate for the party. Whether Modi is the right person to govern India with its pluralistic traditions and diversity can be (and should be) debated - however there seems to be little doubt that his candidature has sparked a new life in the BJP's core cadre. With its growing strength, the party, even with Modi at the helm is no longer untouchable and seems to have cobbled up a reasonable set of alliances in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, it is ironic that the last, and most significant partner to come back the NDA pre poll, Chandrababu Naidu -  had cited the Gujarat riots and the resultant unacceptability of the NDA among Muslims as the reason for his earlier exit and had blamed Modi squarely for the NDA's loss in 2004.
 
Lest we forget the social context has also changed significantly in the country in the last 5 years. The civil society led movement against corruption and the emergence of AAP as a real political alternative has added another variable. The emergence of social media as a tool for political communication also cannot be ignored. That twitter and Facebook have lowered the barriers to entry into the political system cannot be denied, I will stretch the argument to say that something like AAP may never have happened without social media. The effect has not been totally salubrious, with deeper engagement comes partisanship and the pitched battles being fought between left and right wing ultras on social media have led to much bitterness. However, all said and done, it has to be said that together, these changes have brought a large part of society which for various reasons had stayed away from the democratic process (the middle class among others) back into it. The large increase in the number of registered voters (~100M) and the high voter turnout till date are both testament to that.
 
Given how much situations have changed it is inevitable that the electoral arithmatic of 2014 will be very different from 2009, by how much and where the impact will be most dramatic are questions that need to be explored further.

The juggernaut is rolling!

The Banaras visit is behind me now, and am back to the humdrum of daily life. Meanwhile the bandwagon of elections for the 16th Lok Sabha was set rolling yesterday. Six parliamentary constituency went to the polls in the first phase of polling. There is a sense of occasion - the biggest democratic exercise in human history is on its way. On average the turnout in the first phase of elections  (75% in 5 seats in Assam and 84% in one seat in Tripura) is a few percentage points higher than 2009 . Though an early indicator, if this (higher turnout) is a precursor to what will happen in the rest of the country, then together with the 100 million incremental registered voters in 2014,  it makes for a very interesting prospect. Suffice to say that this election is ripe with possibilities. In the effort to try to understand what 2014 has to offer, understanding the political geography of the country and what happened the last time when the nation went to vote are possibly good starting points. Also 2009 is the only election we have had since the last round of delimitation in 2007, hence some merit in starting with a quick look at the political geography before following it up with what happened in 2009.

The following graphic takes a quick look at the political geography of India, with the 35 states/union territories and 543 constituencies - the geographical and demographic diversity of the country is on display in all its grandness.A quick glance tells us about the distribution on population of the countries. The density of constituencies in the doaba region(between the Ganga and Yamuna)  of UP and along the Ganga in Bihar and West Bengal contrasts sharply with the sparser distribution in the mountains to the north, the deserts in the west and the forests in the center . The largest constituencies (Ladakh, Kachchh, Barmer are orders of magnitude bigger than the smallest ones (North Kolkata and South Mumbai).

Learn About Tableau

 Worth noting is the natural hierarchy of states in terms of electoral importance. Just the top 6 states (UP, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu) constitute well over 50% of the total seats. It would be fair to say that no national party/coalition can hope to form a government in the center without a strong performance in at least 3 (ideally UP+2) of these states. With 80 seats, the result in UP alone has often had a strong direct import on who forms the government in the center.

Similarly the top 12 states (top 6 + MP, Karnataka, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Orissa,Kerela) constitute 420 or ~ 80% of the total seats, for all practical purposes National elections are won or lost in these states. 

Out of the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha  seats are reserved for the scheduled castes and  seats are reserved for the scheduled tribes. The below graphic shows the distribution of seats for scheduled castes and tribes across the country. As we can see, the scheduled caste reserved seats are almost uniformly spread across the country while the scheduled tribes seats are concentrated in the forests of central India and the hilly regions of the north east.

Learn About Tableau

 

Learn About Tableau

Lastly worth mentioning here is that looking at a large states like Uttar Pradesh  as a monolith may be seen as analytical oversimplification, and rightly so. Ideally the larger states should be split into smaller political regions for a more nuanced analysis. For example UP can be split into Rohilkhand, Awadh, Purvanchal, Bundelkhand and the Doab (region between Ganga and Yamuna), similarly Andhra Pradesh into Telengana, Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra and Maharashtra into metropolitan Mumbai, Konkan and Vidharba. 

Just a little more work for the data wrangler!

A heroic and flawed compact with democracy

We landed in Banaras yesterday and were promptly greeted by the hot summer sun and huge hoardings proclaiming ‘Abki Baar…’ - just to remind us that we are out of cozy Bangalore and bang in the epicenter of elections 2014.  Modi, the challenger to the throne will be facing off with Kejriwal the wildcard in these elections in Banaras. Mau strongman  Mukhtar Ansari’s wife is contesting and like much of the country it seems like the Congress has not shown up for the elections yet. 

Signs the impending contest are everywhere. In the car the driver slips in an opinion unobtrusively, the owner of my hotel is tallying electoral rolls as we check in. In the mutt the brahmins deliberate quietly, a kid known to them comes by and one of them bounces him in the air regaling him with ‘har har modi’, perhaps unaware of the latest party line, or maybe he couldn’t care less. In the corner shops people are talking about elections over their chai,chat, lassi and paan. 

Elections are serious business here and opinions are professed with a sense of deliberation one does not find in metropolitan folks.  The usual cynicism that big city people have for politics is there but it is not used as a shield to insulate themselves from the political process. Most of them are incredibly well aware about the political context, they know about the candidates and even though some might not have made up their mind, they will vote. In many ways Banaras represents much that is wrong with our country today and still in its narrow and dingy lanes ‘Indias heroic and flawed compact with democracy’ that author and historian Ram Guha talks about, almost comes to life. And with it the thought that perhaps a quick look at our journey as a young democracy, through data on its most significant milestones, the 15 general elections, is a good place to start.

Worth mentioning at this time is that the much maligned task of data cleaning is not quite as thankless as it is made out to be. Along the way one discovers little gems that make it worth the effort. There were quite a few about our democracy that I discovered in the course of the last few months.

For example I did not know that in the first 2 elections (1951 and 1957), we had 86 two-member constituencies (each returning 2 members of parliament) and even one three -member constituency (North Bengal). The purpose of multi member constituencies was to give a stronger voice to minority communities. This practice was discontinued in 1962 elections.

Likewise gathering and cleaning data pushes one to find out more about things that one would not have otherwise encountered, like delimitation. Though most of us heard of the delimitation in 2006, this was the fourth time delimitation happened (before that in 1956, 1966 and 1976). The purpose of this periodic exercise being to ensure that the way constituencies where organized (and reserved) was in sync with changing demographic (due to natural population increase, migration etc). The constitution was specifically amended in 2002 to freeze the allocation of seats by state for 25 years, to ensure that states that did well on social welfare measures and family planning were not unfairly penalized. 

It also tells the story of the gradual evolution of the Union of states. We had 17 after the first reorganization based on linguistic states and now we have 35 states and union territories. Meanwhile, new states were formed, old ones broken up, and names changed to reflect changing sensibilities

Learn About Tableau

As an aside, apart from the sheer magnitude of of it (15 elections with thousands of candidates every time) Indian elections are also a analysts nightmare for other reasons. There are three pairs of constituencies in the country that have the same name- even the spelling.  Hamirpur ( Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh),  Aurangabad (Maharashtra and Bihar) and Maharajganj (Uttar Praadesh and Bihar) make up the trio (or sextet) that will be an irritant to many an analyst. Not to mention constituencies with very similar names – like  Ballia (UP) and Balia (Bihar), Godda (Bihar) and Gonda(UP) , Raigad(Maharashra) and Raigarh (Chhattisgarh). 

The data also tells another story far more important than these factoids, that of the gradual maturing of Indian democracy to reach where it is today. 

Learn About Tableau

To start with the number of votes cast was little over 105 million in the first general election in 1951. It was more than 417 million in the last general election in 2009, that’s more than the four fold increase over 6 years, higher than the average growth rate in population, symptomatic of a young democracy gradually taking root. Though the increase in the number of voters has been steady there have been outliers. Every time the electorate was called on to cast its vote, before the scheduled 5 year interval (example in 1991, 2 years after elections in 1989 and in 1999, barely a year after 1998) the enthusiasm has slacked and the number of votes cast has gone down. On the other hand, the biggest increase in the number of votes polled (compared to the previous election) is quiet visually in the 1977, 1984 and 1989 elections. In each of these instances the electorate was stirred by extraordinary issues and sentiments)

In the same time the number of political parties contesting the elections has gone up from 54 to 366 and the number of candidates has gone up from 2000 to about 8000 (actually consolidated of late from a high of 12500 in 1996)

In the first general elections as many as 10 candidates were elected unopposed. That number has fallen over the years to almost zero is yet another testament of the democratic process gaining maturity.

However merely increased participation is not a strong enough indicator of a democratic system taking root. How well democracy has served its weakest constituents is perhaps a better indicator. In that sense, bringing about a degree of empowerment among some of the historically oppressed sections of society is probably one of the qualified successes of our nation and the democratic process has played a part, credit is due to our founding fathers who envisaged our republic thus. Even the first Lok Sabha elections had 8 seats reserved for the scheduled tribes. Seats were reserved for scheduled castes starting 1962 and as of today, of the 543 constituencies of the Lok sabha-84 are reserved for Scheduled castes, 47  for scheduled tribes and the remainder (412) in the general category.

Lastly to end on a somber note, the data also reminds us is that this compact of ours, with nationhood and democracy, heroic though it might be is far from perfect.  As late as just two decades ago, democracy could not be freely practiced throughout the country. 

Learn About Tableau

There were pockets of unrest - Jammu and Kashmir (1991), Assam (1980 and 1989) and Punjab (1984) where elections were not held with the rest of the country because the state could not guarantee free and fair polls. Just a reminder that democracy, so central to the idea of India, still needs a lot of nurturing.