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Appearance and Reality in Indian Politics: Making Sense of the 1999 General Election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Rob Jenkins
Rob Jenkins*
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Extract

IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT INDIA'S POLITICS ARE NEVER QUITE WHAT THEY seem. If ever there were a banal statement about the collective life of a people this would have to qualify. The politics of any country, almost by definition, fails to represent the daily lives and struggles of ordinary people, and in most cases even the strivings of politicians themselves. Democratic politics is at least as much about distortion as representation – the projection of images to appeal to electorates, for instance, or the softening of policy stances to accommodate seemingly incompatible coalition partners. But ‘national’ politics in India, by which I mean the competition among political elites for control or inf luence over the institutions of the central state, is currently less representative than in any other non-authoritarian country one could imagine. Paradoxically, this is the result of a deepening, rather than a withering, of India's democracy – in particular, the tendency for marginalized groups to seek power on their own terms, through parties explicitly established to represent them, and for elections to be fought not as massive national referendums, but at levels much closer to people's own experience.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 49 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2000

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References

2 Extended summaries of the CSDS analysis can be found in the Indian newsmagazine Frontline (issues dated 23 October and 5 November 1999). An internet version of Frontline can be located at www.the-hindu.com/fline.

3 Wyatt, Andrew, ‘The Limitations on Coalition Politics in India: The Case of Electoral Alliances in Uttar Pradesh’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 37:2 (07 1999), pp. 1–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The political sustainability of economic liberalization is dealt with in much greater detail in Jenkins, Rob, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999 Google Scholar.

5 This analysis comes from Sanjay Kumar of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

6 Jenkins, Rob, ‘India’s Electoral Result: An Unholy Alliance Between Nationalism and Regionalism’, Briefing Paper no. 42, London, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 03 1998 Google Scholar.

7 Jenkins, ‘India’s Electoral Result’, op. cit.