Citizen Raj: Surjit Bhalla's book on polls offers a platter of tasty facts

Yogendra Yadav says, “Like tea, cinema or cricket, there is something about elections that makes it appear like an age old Indian passion.” In this season of general elections and nightly thrillers from the Indian Premier League, we election junkies couldn’t be happier than pigs in a pile of warm s**t. There couldn’t be a better time for data-maven-turned-psephologist Surjit Bhalla to present his analyses of the 16 Indian general elections to date and his forecast for the 17th presently underway.

Bhalla’s coverage of a vast canvas from independent India’s choice of democracy (with universal franchise, which he does not mention) to the numerous talking points hot off the front pages of today’s papers in a rather slim volume (rendered slimmer by about 40 per cent fewer words per page than an average book) may seem audacious but is more likely presumptuous. His treatment of developments in all but the lasttwo decades is cursory and at times not convincing.

For example, he concludes that given the diversity and poverty of India, the choice of democracy was the only one possible. He also comes up with a correlation that shows the British colonial heritage to be the decisive factor. That is both amusing and ahistorical. The Indian was always argumentative and valued the right to be so. India does not quite fit the pattern of oriental despotism. The city republic of Vaishali flourished. Panchayats had a pan-Indian presence to decide on community matters temporal and legal, whose decisions even the local satraps could not easily overrule. Trade guilds (mahajans) held sway over coastal regions engaged in national and international commerce, much like their counterparts in medieval Europe. The jajmani system of patron-client barter transactions introduced a fair degree of interdependence. All these institutions meet with the twin necessities of contestability and participation of democratic institutions.

Bhalla’s discussion of Nehru is standard potted history with the all too well-known shibboleths on socialism and planning. He observes that Nehru “failed to expand primary and secondary education. Instead, he chose to build somewhat elitist models of wisdom (the IITs).” Though he adds that the importance of higher education cannot be denied, he errs in posing the choice as a binary. India could not have grown rapidly in the globalised world without its greatest assets, its brainpower.

Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and the Janata interregnum are again themes too well researched and documented. So Bhalla is able to jump over the many issues with ease. He parses all the elections, especially those leading up to the 2014 game-changer, primarily through the economic lens. He is greatly impressed by the American Professor Roy Fair’s model of US election forecasts based on economic data: “That kindled my obsession with analysis and forecast of elections.”

Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi

The one development that fully engages him is the advent of opinion surveys and polls, most notably the earliest ones by Prannoy Roy and Ashok Lahiri in 1984. With all due respect to Roy and Lahiri, Bhalla again errs in calling them “the pioneers of psephology in India”. That honour must belong to EPW da Costa who brilliantly explained in The Times of India in the 1970s how the Congress in the 1950s and 1960s regularly won 60 per cent or more of the seats with less than 50 per cent of the popular vote. He devised an index of opposition unity to predict the number of Congress seats with a given vote share. The greater the opposition unity, the lesser the multiplier translating the Congress vote-share into its seat share. Bhalla’s own methodology is built around this core.

That brings us to the main purpose of this tract: The forecast of a second term for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Narendra Modi as Prime Minister. More than 60 per cent of the book explores various facets of this theme. Bhalla has never hidden his admiration of Modi and has slain many dragons with data and aplomb in his popular columns: Damage done by demonetisation, loss of employment, drop in real investment, suspicious data revision, among others. These are all presented in the book. Much of the criticism of the Modi rule is deserved, but at times marred by “what-if” type of wishful thinking of the critics who are clearly uncomfortable with Modi’s ascendance. Bhalla performs a vital service in helping restore some balance and objectivity to the debate.

In the same spirit, this reviewer must recall that Bhalla was not always a Modi fan. He had said on December 13, 2012 (“The Modi metric”, The Indian Express), that “An argument for prime ministership that all can respect,… is that the best choice … is one who can deliver the most inclusive growth.” He concluded that Gujarat has delivered growth under Modi, but it had been neither equitable nor inclusive. But now, Prime Minister Modi has a record of inclusive growth (chapter 11).

Bhalla says that since the 2002 Gujarat riots happened under Modi’s chief-ministership, he “was, by definition, accountable for whatever happened under his watch”. But he quickly hyphenates that with the 1984 riots, thus shading his earlier statement. His take on the shock 2004 election result is: “[A]lliance math, …bad weather... and a disciplined macroeconomy were responsible for…Vajpayee’s loss.” He acknowledges that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar accounted for almost the entire loss of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but does not consider the very real possibility that in these two states and Andhra Pradesh, the substantial anti-Modi Muslim vote caused the National Democratic Alliance a loss of 80 of its 299 seats. It is an enigma of Indian electoral history that the worst NDA liability in 2004 became its prime asset 10 years later. That possibility does not interest Bhalla.

So now to the pièce de résistance: What does 2019 have in store for us? Bhalla says BJP 274, Congress 57, far more optimistic (for the BJP) than other predictions. I might add parenthetically that my own armchair forecast based on those universally acknowledged oracles, taxi drivers and vegetable sellers, is BJP 255+, Congress 70. My figures as of March 10, 2014 were BJP 225, NDA, 265 (“One horse race”, India Abroad) when no one gave BJP more than 180. I must acknowledge that my guesswork was inspired by Bhalla’s columns but not based on them. 

So, as you spend the next month glued to the tube for all that you did and did not want to know about the on-going election, enjoy this quickie platter of morsels served up by Chef Bhalla. But fast foods are not savoured for their nutritional value, so don’t look for lasting insights. And be prepared for it being a tad short of a tasty treat.

Citizen Raj
Indian elections 1952-2019

Author: Surjit S Bhalla

Publisher: Westland Publications

Pages: xxviii+222

Price: Rs 499