Hindustan Times

E Sridharan

The Congress stormed to victory, twice, but behind the banner of first-past-the-post wins, state by state, the vote shares were quietly changing. Paving the way for a powerful opposition coalition, which would wrest the reins in 1989.

A party at its peak

The Indian party system, since independence, has been shaped by its systemic characteristics of being a single-member constituency, simple plurality electoral system, better known in common parlance as the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, where each constituency elects one candidate by a plurality of votes received, a simple majority of votes not being necessary. This FPTP system operates in a federal system where state assemblies are similarly elected under FPTP in simultaneous or non-simultaneous elections. Political parties operate within the incentives and imperatives inherent in FPTP under federalism. The party system has evolved under these systemic incentives and imperatives, starting with the initial configuration of the Congress party as a broad, pan-Indian umbrella party with a base in all states, surrounded by much smaller parties with narrower social bases and with strongholds in only one or a few states each, and with Indian federalism being reconfigured on a linguistic basis from 1956. The party system has evolved in the following broad phases since the first general elections of 1952. <h2 style="text-align:center;">The backdrop</h2>The first phase, 1952-67, was the phase of almost unchallenged Congress hegemony. The Congress won over two-thirds of seats in the 1952, 1957 and 1962 elections, under Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, based on only pluralities of the vote (vote share was 44% to 48%), and won majorities in almost all state assemblies during this period, again on the basis mostly of pluralities of the vote.

This was because the opposition was divided, not consolidated, in each state for both Lok Sabha and assembly elections; the opposition vote was not consolidated behind a leading opposition party that had attained critical mass enough to be a viable challenger to the Congress, this, in turn, reflecting the broad social coalition underlying the Congress and not underlying any opposition party then. The period from 1967 to ’89 saw the playing out of a process of bipolarisation of state-level party systems for both Lok Sabha and assembly elections that resulted in the emergence of a range of non-Congress parties as viable challengers to the Congress, for both Lok Sabha and assembly seats. The process began with the 1967 election, in which the Congress fell to a 41% vote share and 54% seat share and lost power in eight of the then 16 major states in the till-then-simultaneous assembly elections. The bipolarisation of party systems can be seen as the result of the playing out of the logic of Duverger’s Law in a federal system. The basic Duvergerian logic is that most voters over time tend not to “waste” their votes on candidates of parties not likely to win, and gravitate to parties most likely to be able to challenge their least-liked party, resulting in the emergence of a principal opposition party from a fragmented opposition space at the constituency and, by extension, state level, in the Indian federal context. The period from 1967 to 1989 saw the emergence of such bipolar party systems in several Indian states in which the Congress faced a principal opposition party. The emergence of such principal opposition parties at the state level was aided by the delinking of national and state assembly elections in a large number of states, from 1969 onwards, due to the early collapse of several state governments; delinked elections helped regional parties by enabling a focus on state-level issues and leaderships during campaigns. There were multiple bipolarities. For example, Congress vs Left in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura; Congress vs a regional party in Tamil Nadu, Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Assam; and Congress vs the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) / Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi; and Congress vs splinter groups of the Janata party in some Hindi-belt states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, Haryana, as well as in Odisha and Karnataka, although in these five states as well as in Gujarat and Maharashtra the Congress retained dominance until 1989, unless confronted by a coalition of Janata splinter groups. The key point for us while looking at the 1980 and 1984 elections is that during this period viable challengers to the Congress were emerging or had emerged in several states and, if in coalition, nationally, by 1980 and 1984. <h2 style="text-align:center;">The 1980 mandate</h2>If we view the 1980 election against this evolutionary backdrop, it is both an apparently normal election restoring the old pattern as well as an exceptional election because it came after India’s first non-Congress government, and a coalition government at that, at the national level.

To understand this election, we need to go into the formation of the Janata Party and the record of the Janata government from 1977 to 1979. The Janata Party came into being just before the post-Emergency (1975-77) exceptional election, by the merger of five parties: Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD), the Socialist Party, the Jagjivan Ram-led Congress for Democracy (a Congress breakaway), the Indian National Congress (Organisation), and the BJS (a precursor to the 1980-formed BJP). All these were based in the Hindi-belt states, primarily UP and Bihar, though the Congress (O) had bases in western India and Karnataka too. The BLD was itself a merger in 1974 of Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD), the Samyukta Socialist Party led by Raj Narain, the Utkal Congress, the Swatantra Party and three minor parties. The social base of the BLD and the socialists was the intermediate-caste farmers of the Hindi belt, with the Swatantra Party bringing in former princes and their support bases, and the BJS bringing in the urban trading community and upper-caste middle classes. All this marked an erosion of the umbrella character of the Congress, which remained largely dominated by the landowning upper castes with support from the Scheduled Castes and minorities in the northern, central and western regions. Though the Janata Party was formally a merged single party and won a majority (295 seats, 54% seat share) with 41% of votes, it was a surplus majority coalition with a non-merged partner, the Akali Dal. The Congress in 1977 crashed to its then historic low of 154 seats (28% seat share) with 34.5% of votes against a unified opposition that spanned the entire Hindi belt, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Orissa. So this was the party-coalitional and underlying social-coalitional backdrop to the 1977 election. The January 1980 election was held after a very recent double collapse — the collapse of the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai in July 1979 and, within weeks, the collapse of the Charan Singh-led Janata Party (Secular), a Janata splinter group, minority government when the Congress withdrew support to it. It was also a year of economic downturn. So the 1980 election was held in a context in which coalition government was seen to be unstable, and with a fragmented opposition to a Congress that was led by a strong leader, Indira Gandhi, who had earlier led the country for 11 years. The result was a 9% swing in favour of the Congress, taking it to a two-thirds majority of 353 (of 529 seats, elections not being held in 12 seats in Assam, 1 seat in Meghalaya) with 43% of votes, while the Janata Party (Secular) secured 41 seats with 9.4% of votes, the Janata Party (then including what became the BJP in April 1980) getting 31 seats with 6% of votes, the Congress (Urs), a Congress splinter, getting 13 seats and 5.3% of votes. Both the Janata factions got fewer seats than the Left parties, which got a combined 47 seats with 8.6% of votes, concentrated in three states. State-wise, the Congress won a handsome majority in almost all states, with the Janata factions putting up significant resistance only in UP (Congress 51 seats, JPS 29 seats), Bihar (Congress 30 seats, JP 8 seats, JPS 5 seats) and Haryana (Congress 5 seats, JPS 4 seats, JP 1 seat), where a large part of the erstwhile Congress social coalition of intermediate and backward castes had shifted to the Janata factions. The only other states that the Congress lost were West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura to the Left, J&K to the National Conference. In Tamil Nadu, an alliance with the DMK fetched the Congress 20 seats and the DMK 16 seats. On the face of it, the 1980 election was an apparently normal election in that it repeated the well-known pattern of 1952 to 1971, repeated in reverse by the Janata Party in 1977, of the largest party getting only a plurality not a simple majority of votes, with a voteshare in the forties, being catapulted to a large majority of seats due to the properties of the FPTP system. The same pattern was repeated in most states, but with a more emphatic Congress rebound getting it majority, not just plurality, votes in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi, among large and medium-sized states.

However, the 1980 election can also be seen as an unusual election in that it was the first election after a pre-full term, early collapse of India’s first coalition government, itself a hastily-put-together alliance formed after an exceptional political break, the Emergency, to save democracy. This coalition, which did not cover the whole country like the Congress traditionally did, and was disparate in its social coalition and ideology (ranging as it did from the socialists to the BJS), could not effectively challenge the Congress. <h2 style="text-align:center;">The 1984 verdict</h2>Against the above backdrop, let us now look at the 1984 election. On the face of it, again, this looked like a traditional Congress sweep, the largest ever, resembling the victories of 1952 to 1962. The Congress won 404 of 514 seats (Assam’s 14, Punjab’s 13 and 2 other seats did not go to the polls at first but did so later) with 49.1% of votes (more than 1957’s 47.8%) against a divided opposition (in all, after Assam and Punjab, the Congress won 415 seats or 77% of seats, with 48.1% of votes). The three main opposition parties, contesting separately after the breakup of the Janata Party in 1979 and the reformation of the erstwhile BJS as the BJP in April 1980, fared as follows: The BJP won 2 seats (8% of votes), the JP 10 seats (7% of votes) and the Charan Singh-led Lok Dal 3 seats (6% of votes). The Left parties won 28 seats (8.6% of votes).

If one looks at the results state-wise, the picture looks fairly similar. The Congress swept the seats with majorities, not just pluralities, of the vote in most large and medium-sized states across India. The only significant opposition victories were of the newly formed Telugu Desam Party (TDP) led by actor NT Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh (45%&nbsp;of votes&nbsp;to the Congress’s 42%), and those of the Left in West Bengal and Tripura. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress took 25 of 39 seats in a senior partnership with the AIADMK, and in Kerala beat the Left with 13 of 20 seats and 33%&nbsp;of votes.&nbsp;However, if one looks more closely at opposition party vote shares in the states, what emerges is the achievement of significant opposition vote shares in a large number of large and medium-sized states, usually centred on a principal opposition party, more so than in 1980. Thus, in Gujarat, the BJP got 19%, JP 17%; in Odisha, JP 32%; Himachal Pradesh, BJP 23%; Madhya Pradesh, BJP 30%; Rajasthan, BJP 24%, Lok Dal 11%; Haryana, Lok Dal 19%; Karnataka, JP 35%; UP, Lok Dal 22%; Bihar, Lok Dal 14%; Delhi, BJP 19%. &nbsp;These numbers show a potential for a viable challenge by an opposition coalition in a large number of states, adding up to a potential majority in the Lok Sabha for an opposition coalition, something that in fact happened later on in the 1989 election. And underlying these vote shares it represents a diminution in a large number of states of the Congress’s umbrella social coalition, which had been gradually eroding since the late 1960s, the beneficiaries being regional and Left parties, and lower-caste, agrarian parties in the northern belt.&nbsp;As it happened, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh riots that followed, and the immediate swearing in of her son Rajiv Gandhi made 1984 an exceptional election, a crisis election that was pitched as a battle between stability and chaos and was probably felt that way by a large part of the electorate (though we do not have reliable survey data&nbsp;on&nbsp;this). Hence, what could have been an early precursor of 1989 — Congress versus an opposition coalition — became a more emphatic Congress sweep by seats and votes than&nbsp;in any earlier election.&nbsp;(Eswaran Sridharan&nbsp;has been&nbsp;academic director and chief executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI),&nbsp;New Delhi, since&nbsp;its inception in 1997)