In this final piece, I look at the last three general elections and the great turning point of 2014, which saw the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha on its own for the first time, with 31% of votes.
The BJP’s victory at the national level was accompanied by many victories in state elections, often with large majorities of seats. Even though the party has won less than half of the 50 state elections that have taken place since 2014, it has done much better than its opponents, particularly the Congress, as political scientist Sanjay Kumar recently observed in a tweet. The Congress has won seven, regional parties have won 19, and the BJP and its allies have won 24 state assembly elections in this period.
The BJP’s string of victories helped create an image of invincibility, prompting political scientists Milan Vaishnav and Suhas Palshikar to suggest that India was entering a new phase of dominance or hegemony, propositions that were confirmed with the BJP’s victory in 2019. In the Hindi belt, the BJP and its allies won 201 out of 226 seats in 2014, and 202 in 2019.
Electoral outcome data alone is not sufficient to capture the features of this new phase of Indian politics.
Writing on the subject, Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson listed five features of what they called India’s fourth party system — ideological hegemony (or reluctance of the opposition to attack the dominant party’s core ideology), charismatic leadership, a formidable electoral machinery and disproportionate access to resources, the ability to shape the terms of electoral competition, and a divided opposition.
In this article, I look at how the advent of a new party system translates in representational terms, as well as its impact on electoral competition for individual MPs.
An upper-caste resurgence
Supporters in Gurugram wear Narendra Modi masks ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Data collected for the last three Lok Sabha elections reveal a significant resurgence of upper caste representation in the Hindi belt. Upper castes made up 35% of all Hindi belt MPs between 1996 and 2004. This average rose to 41% over the last three elections. Interestingly, the share of upper-caste MPs rose in 2009, rather than 2014, thus preceding the BJP wave.
Other Backward Classes (OBC) and intermediary caste representation decreased slightly, dropping from 32.5% between 1996 and 2004 to 29% between 2009 and 2019.
But the representation of backward groups did rise in 2014 and 2019, due to their broader inclusion among BJP candidates. More significantly, the share of non-dominant OBCs increased substantially within the BJP, because of a broadening of its candidate recruitment strategy.
The continuing marginalisation of Muslims
The representation of Muslims dipped to a historical low in the Hindi belt (1.8% in 2014 and 3.5% in 2019). Overall, the Lok Sabha’s lack of representativeness is most glaring when one considers its religious composition. Across India, 91% of MPs are Hindus (for a share of 82% of the population), against 4.8% Muslims (who make up 14% of the population).
The share of Hindu MPs has been nearly constant since the early 1960s. It dipped slightly in 1980 and 1984, when Muslim representation rose to nine and eight per cent respectively. But otherwise, despite the deep transformations of the party system, and the fragmentation of the political space over time, the representational imbalance between Hindus and minorities has remained unchanged since Independence.
There are, however, significant variations between parties. Muslims still find representation in the Congress and various regional parties, albeit in small numbers in most of them. The BJP, on the other hand, has made the choice of exclusion, refusing to nominate Muslim candidates even in seats where they dominate demographically. In 2019, the BJP nominated only six Muslim candidates (none in the Hindi belt), none of whom won. By excluding Muslims totally from national representation, the BJP exacerbates a longstanding trend of politically marginalisation of Muslims in India.
Women remain sidelined
Out of the 1629 MPs elected since 2014 (excluding by-elections), only 199 were women. 84 won on a BJP ticket, against 33 on a Congress ticket and 82 won on the tickets of other parties.
In 2019, India elected 78 women, the largest number since Independence (14.4%). This three-per cent increase from 2014 was driven by the overall performance of the BJP and by the decision of two parties – Trinamool Congress and Biju Janata Dal – to include more women candidates.
As far as national parties are concerned, their share of women contestants and elected representatives remain low. In percentage terms, in 2019, women only made 12.7% of the BJP candidates and 13.5% of its MPs, against 12.8% and 11.5% respectively for Congress, and 10.8% and 15.9% for state-based parties.
The low representation of women in the Lok Sabha has always been the result of a choice by political parties to exclude them. Most parties support the Women Reservation Bill in words but not in deed. The growing participation of women in elections as voters has not translated into greater inclusion within parties.
India’s small professional political class
Home Minister Amit Shah at Parliament in December 2019.
Many commentators have written about the many ways power under the Modi regime has become more centralised. There is however another form of power concentration that transcends the BJP and the current period. Considering all MPs elected more than twice as belonging to the category of a professional politician, we can define a measure of concentration of power in the Lok Sabha as well as within parties.
In the current Lok Sabha (as elected in 2019), 119 MPs fit this description. 67 of them belong to the BJP, only 14 to Congress and 35 to state-based parties. This is a low ratio compared to the 1990s, but higher than in the 1980s, when 17% of MPs on average belonged to the stable political class.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh at Parliament in December 2019.
What is striking is that except for the late 1990s and early 2000s, this number has always been low, illustrating the intense, constant reshuffling of India’s political class. This may be good news in terms of elite renewal, but in reality, it leaves power in the hands of small elites within parties, who control their organisation like quasi private enterprises.
Another adverse effect of such concentration is that it further increases the marginalisation of under-represented groups. Among the 119 MPs who have been elected more than twice, only 12 are women and only 5 are Muslim.
Beyond identity
There is of course more to representation than caste, gender or religion. Since 2004, we have access to more information on candidates and MPs, thanks to the legal advocacy of the Association for Democratic Reforms, through the disclosure of their assets, criminal charges and other socio-demographic information.
An examination of all party-wise affidavits since 2004 reveals that the individual wealth of all candidates rose six-fold since 2004, and nearly nine-fold among elected MPs. MPs of regional parties are currently 13 times richer than in 2004. The share of candidates self-declaring business as their main occupation has also increased, even though many dissimulate their sources of income behind the label of social or political worker.
At the same time, the share of MPs with declared criminal cases rose from 30% in 2009 to 43% in 2019. Within these numbers, the share of MPs with serious criminal cases against them (violent crimes, electoral fraud, etc.) rose from 14% to 29%.
The portrait that we can draw of the Lok Sabha in recent years is that of an assembly dominated by men, mostly Hindu, disproportionately upper-caste, a significant number of whom belong to political families. These four markers of elitism are further compounded by a selection of candidates through wealth and the occupational profile of MPs, increasingly grounded in business activities. As such, India’s Parliament bears little resemblance to the broader population it is meant to represent.
In all these aspects, there are no substantial differences among main parties, including the BJP. It is striking that the elected representatives from the “party with a difference” boast a similar elite profile as the parties they denounce as the old establishment.
While there is no doubt that profound changes have taken place and that until recently, power has been more distributed than in the past, the elitism of India’s political class might be its most enduring characteristic. The composition of India’s political elites may have changed over time, but the overall elitism of the political class as a whole remains a constant. This fact does not diminish the extraordinary achievement of preserving a functioning electoral democracy for 75 years, but it should invite us to reflect on the meaning of representation.
(Gilles Verniers is assistant professor of Political Science and co-director, Trivedi Centre for Political Data.)
