Election season is upon us. This year there will be five more assembly elections and next year is the general election.

So it’s time to talk about some voting paradoxes. These are created as much by voters as by political parties.

Thus, we know that people are selfish and therefore not naturally socialist. Yet the Congress party harnessed this contra-instinct to win elections with huge success.

But people are also bewildered by their existence and fearful of life and, therefore, naturally religious. The BJP has harnessed this to massive political advantage since 1989.

The Congress Party rejected spirituality in the name of secularism, that is, keeping religion separate from the State. The BJP, on the other hand, has promised Hindus spiritual peace and a sense of collective identity based on religion rather than mere citizenship. It is God who is the warden, not the State.

Yet, since 1989, the appeal of the Congress’s socialist promises has been declining and of the BJP’s spiritual ones increasing. It is the BJP that controls the thinking of Hindu Indians today. The Congress, in contrast, can’t even control the thinking of its own members.

Hence the paradox: religiosity, that will not really benefit the voter in material terms, is preferred to socialism that will. This is a case of a bird in hand being rejected for two in the bush.

India is not unique in this respect. Paradoxical voter behaviour is a universal phenomenon in genuinely competitive democracies where the government doesn’t dictate who the voters should vote for. But why do these paradoxes exist in the first place?

Many European thinkers since the late 18th century, and American ones since the mid-20th, have been trying to explain this. They have met with only partial success because the key question — why do voters vote against their own interests — has been left hanging. No one knows.

Underlying value

There is another paradox. The BJP while promising a Hindu haven and heaven in India has actually been delivering material plenty of socialist things.

Since 1989 the other parties (with the exception of the TMC) and most notably the Congress, while promising material things, are adopting Hinduism as their implicit underlying value.

This political convergence points to another paradox: while parties will benefit from offering either/or choices to the voter, they offer combinations. This despite the fact that combinations minimise their gains because they confuse many uncommitted voters.

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