R Jagannathan: The schizophrenic Indian voter

MICROVIEW

It is the easiest thing in the world to fall for the either/or trap. And this is what has happened with most of the post-election analyses one has seen in the Indian media.

Very few people thought the NDA would lose so badly; so it was fashionable to presume that governance and performance were the core election issues.

Now that the Congress and its allies have won, it is fashionable to pretend that the vote was for secularism, for Sonia, et al. So we have columnist after columnist singing paeans of praise for the Indian voter, who in his wisdom has rejected narrow sectarian ideologies and reaffirmed the glorious "inclusiveness" of the Indian "civilisational ethos".

It's nice to know that caste-based or sectarian parties like Laloo Yadav's RJD or Mulayam Singh's SP or Mayawati's BSP are "inclusivist" just because they did well in the last elections.

The problem with this kind of shallow analysis is the one-dimensional approach they bring to understanding voter behaviour.

The reality is more complex; and the Indian voter can have multiple personalities. He may be both sectarian and non-sectarian at the same time "" which side predominates depends on a whole host of factors and circumstances.

My journalistic cynicism does not allow me to believe that the same people who voted so overwhelmingly for Narendra Modi 18 months ago are today paragons of secularism just because they gave the Congress a lot more seats in Gujarat this time. The people are the same "" the question is why did they vote so differently this time? The answer cannot be that they have dumped their Hindutva leanings all of a sudden.

I believe that Indians "" and Hindus in particular "" voted for the BJP in some states when they saw sham secularism going too far against the interests of Hindus.

But they swung back to the middle when they saw what could happen when rioters and murderers masquerade as protectors of Hinduism. This does not make the average Hindu secular or non-secular. He is both. You cannot presume that a Hindu is not concerned about his narrow caste or religious interests; nor is it true that he will sacrifice his economic and other interests in the name of Hinduism.

Or, take the Sonia issue. Many Indians "" especially among the upper classes "" don't want her as prime minister, but are afraid to say so openly because it makes them seem narrow-minded.

In my last column, I had written about the inappropriateness of her accepting the prime minister's job for various reasons. Of the responses I got for the column, the opinion was 8:2 against Sonia.

On the Business Standard website, our opinion poll showed the anti-Sonia tide running in the same overwhelming proportion. While website opinion polls are not representative of the views of the general public, they are indicative of the kind of negative emotions Sonia had aroused among many Indians.

I would recommend two great books that offer terrific insights into the Indian psyche and their voting behaviour. One book is called Being Indian, authored by Pawan Varma; the other is titled Why ethnic parties succeed, by Kanchan Chandra.

Varma, an IFS officer, says that Indians are "extraordinarily sensitive to the calculus of power...they are not democratic by instinct or temperament. Democracy has survived and flourished in India because it was quickly seen to be one of the most effective systems of upward mobility...".

If Varma's view is right, the voter may vote for secular parties if he thinks that will bring him gain; he might swing the other way if he thinks otherwise. There may be nothing purely secular or communal in the way he presses the EVM button on voting day.

Chandra, an assistant professor in the department of political science at MIT, says that India is a patronage democracy, where voters "choose between parties by conducting ethnic headcounts (in various parties) rather than comparing policy platforms or ideological positions".

Translated, this means castes and communities check to see which parties have more of their fellow caste-members in the upper echelons of power, and then vote for it.

This explains why even amoral party-hopping does not diminish the ability of various caste, especially dalit, leaders to pull in votes en bloc. Ethnic parties can by no stretch of imagination be called secular "" they exist primarily to pull in votes from their community, just like the BJP is trying to encash the Hindu vote.

Sometimes ethnic parties work in tandem with other ethnic parties to improve their aggregate vote shares (Laloo plus Paswan plus Muslims in Bihar, and the Muslim-Yadav vote bank of Mulayam).

These combos are not driven by esoteric ideals like secularism or inclusivism, but pure self-interest, and a hard-headed calculation of each party's ability to bring in the sectarian vote. Between them, Varma and Chandra provide a far more satisfying explanation of Indian behaviour than any editorial analyst I have seen or heard.

rjagann@business-standard.com