The Hindu Business Line : Anti-incumbency neutralises voter apathy

The first phase of elections saw 55 per cent polling. Since this preliminary figure is likely to be revised upwards, there is no strong evidence so far indicating voter apathy in the general elections. It can be argued that the prevalence of strong anti-incumbency sentiments among the electorate has become an important factor containing voter apathy, says Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.

BEFORE the 13th general elections, in September-October 1999, it was contended that the voters had become tired of frequent elections. After all, for the first time in Indian history, three general elections had been held within a span of less than three-and-a-half years.

The 1999 elections, however, disproved such a hypothesis. The 59.99 per cent turnout in 1999 was a little lower than the 61.97 per cent in the 1998 elections, but higher than the 57.94 per cent turnout in 1996.

Even if many of the 670 million-plus voters are poor and illiterate and should have good reason for being disillusioned with democratic institutions of governance, the fact is that they exercise their franchise in much higher proportion than the educated and economically better-off urban middle-class.

For instance, the South Delhi constituency (with a relatively educated and prosperous electorate) recorded only a 42 per cent voter turnout in 1999. Former Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, the architect of economic reforms in the P. V. Narasimha Rao government, lost by around 30,000 votes to the BJP's Dr Vijay Kumar Malhotra from this constituency.

What explains the continuing enthusiasm for voting to an extent is the strong anti-incumbency trend witnessed in the last three general elections. On each occasion, 40-50 per cent of incumbent MPs were rejected, most of them by the voters though some were denied ticket by their parties.

Each of the last three Lok Sabhas has seen some 250 new faces in a House comprising 543 members. The number of constituencies retained by political parties in the last three elections has barely exceeded half the total number of seats in the Lok Sabha: the exact figures are 264 in 1996, 263 in 1998 and 283 in 1999.

This is indeed a telling indicator of the way the electorate punishes politicians perceived to be "non-performing". Anti-incumbency sentiments operate both at the Central as well as the State levels. It is not uncommon for a party's MPs to pay the price for the failure of their State government to deliver on its promises.

Though it may seem unfair that an individual MP should be punished by the electorate for no fault of his, the flip side is that good work done by a particular party's government too pays off for the incumbent MP.

In the 1999 elections, there were strong anti-incumbency sentiments in a number of States. These sentiments worked against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

The same sentiments worked against the Congress in Orissa and Rajasthan and the Asom Gana Parishad in Assam. However, many State governments defied this trend. Among these were the Left-ruled States of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, the Congress-ruled Madhya Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party-ruled Andhra Pradesh and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-ruled Tamil Nadu.

However, in the May 2001 Assembly elections, anti-incumbency sentiments were strong in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam but not in West Bengal. Voters in West Bengal returned the incumbent regime and what helped was the fact that the Communist Party of India-Marxist led Left Front replaced the octogenarian Mr Jyoti Basu with Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (who is 25 years younger) as chief minister, though Mr Basu holds the distinction of having been India's longest-serving chief minister (between 1977 and 2001).

During the Assembly elections in December 2003, there were strong anti-incumbency sentiments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh but these were conspicuous by their absence in the national capital, Delhi.

The importance of anti-incumbency sentiments is best illustrated by the BJP's performance in undivided Uttar Pradesh, the most populous State, which used to account for almost one-sixth of the total seats in the Lok Sabha (85 out of 543) before it was divided.

In the 1998 elections, the BJP on its own had won 57 seats and its allies three more. In 1999, however, the party could barely win 29 seats on its own and a total of 32 seats with its allies. While most political pundits and psephologists had predicted some reverses for the BJP in UP, the magnitude and scale of the party's losses, in a four-corner contest in most parts of the State, came as a surprise even to them.

The surprising nature of the UP results in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections was attributed by many to "tactical voting'' by those opposed to the BJP (a reference to the Muslims in particular). However, election data do not bear out such a hypothesis. If indeed tactical voting was resorted to in larger measure, the voting patterns should have shown less of a division in the non-BJP votes in constituencies than in the past.

On the contrary, what the data revealed was a significant increase in the division of votes in most constituencies. To be precise, the index of opposition unity (IOU), a statistical tool used by psephologists to measure the division of opposition votes, had increased vis-a-vis 1998 in 57 of the State's 85 Lok Sabha constituencies.

The increased division of votes in UP was thanks largely to the fact that the Congress, which had been reduced to no seats and just 6 per cent of the vote in 1998, increased its vote share by 8 percentage points to 14 per cent in 1999 and won 10 seats while two more seats were won by its ally, the Rashtriya Lok Dal lead by Mr Ajit Singh.

The real reason for the BJP's debacle in UP was an extremely strong anti-incumbency wave against the party. The BJP, which had won 36.5 per cent of the votes in the state in the 1998 elections, got only 27.6 per cent in 1999, a drop of about 9 per cent.

This was by far the largest swing of votes away from an incumbent state government anywhere in the country in the 1999 elections. However, this swing away from the BJP was not uniform across all sections of UP society. There were clear indications of a marked disenchantment among the upper castes, which had in the 1990s been ardent supporters of the BJP.

The result of this disenchantment was that Mr Kalyan Singh, the man the BJP had projected through the 1990s as its most popular mass leader in the state, had to step down as chief minister a month after the results of the 1999 Lok Sabha elections were known and yield place to Mr Ram Prakash Gupta, a man who was Deputy Chief Minister two decades earlier in 1977, but had since then been consigned to political oblivion.

Despite the so-called dynamism displayed by Mr Gupta's successor Mr Rajnath Singh and his concerted efforts to woo the "most backward classes," the BJP (with its ally, the RLD) was unable to recover lost ground in the February 2002 Assembly elections — the party ended up coming third (with 88 seats) after the Samajwadi Party (143 seats) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (98 seats).

With the RLD now with the SP and with Mr Kalyan Singh back in the fold of the BJP, it would be interesting to ascertain the extent to which anti-incumbency sentiments would prevail in the four-cornered electoral contest that will now ensue in UP.

In Bihar, poll pundits have often been puzzled by the absence of anti-incumbency sentiments against the allegedly corrupt and inefficient Rashtriya Janata Dal government headed by Mrs Rabri Devi, wife of Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav. Before the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, it had been claimed that the RJD would perform very poorly. But that did not happen. If some of the recent exit polls are correct, the story would be repeated this time round as well.

Election data reveal that the RJD and its major ally in the state, the Congress, had both increased their share of the popular vote in 1999. Yet, the alliance (which also included the CPI-M) could win just 12 seats (RJD - 7, Congress - 4 and CPI-M - 1) out of the (the undivided) State's 54 Lok Sabha seats. This was electoral arithmetic at work rather than anti-incumbency sentiments.

While the Janata Dal had contested against the BJP-Samata Party alliance and the Congress-RJD alliance in 1998, it had joined the NDA in the 1999 elections.

Since the Janata Dal had secured 9 per cent of the popular vote in the 1998 elections, this addition was always likely to be electorally significant, if the party's supporters were willing to accept such an alliance.

As it turned out, the majority was comfortable with this arrangement. Thus, the addition of 6 per cent to the NDA's kitty was enough to add 10 seats to its tally in Bihar.

This time, with Mr Ram Vilas Paswan going along with the RJD, the balance has been tilted in favour of the incumbents in the State.

By any yardstick of performance, the RJD government in Bihar cannot be said to have "performed" if one looks at the economic indicators of one of India's poorest states.

This would suggest that the anti-incumbency factor too should not be seen merely as a consequence of "lack of performance" by State governments, as perceived by analysts or sections of the media.

It is a rather more complex mix of developmental issues and of community identity and izzat (honour or pride) that matters.

(The author is Director, School of Convergence, International Management Institute, New Delhi and a journalist with over 25 years of experience in various media — print, Internet, radio and television. This article has been based on a section of a book co-authored by him and Shankar Raghuraman entitled: "A Time of Coalitions: Divided We Stand" published recently by Sage Publications. He can be contacted at paranjoy@yahoo.com.)