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As we suggested earlier, India was the subject of particular acts of invention through the prolonged deliberations of the Constituent Assembly that drew up the Constitution of India – the longest that there is in the world – in 1946–49. Of central importance was that India should be a parliamentary democracy – improbable though this was according to the classic comparative study of Barrington Moore (1966). India, he thought, presents the paradox of the establishment of political democracy without there having first been an industrial revolution. India (in the mid-twentieth century), Moore said, belonged to two worlds: ‘Economically it remains in the pre-industrial age … There has been no bourgeois revolution … But as a political species it does belong to the modern world’ (1966: 314). India’s democracy was imperfect, but certainly not a sham. Still, many of India’s problems, Moore thought, followed from the fact of the unlikely establishment of democracy in a country that, in the later 1940s had only a very small bourgeoisie – the class often credited with being at least the initial driving force behind democratization – and a very small organized working class, which other scholars find to have been the main social force pushing for the consolidation of democracy. India was still, as we’ve said, overwhelmingly an agrarian society, in which landlords remained powerful. And landlords, as Moore argued, depend heavily upon labour that is unfree, and so they are generally opposed to democratization.

Yet, for the political elite who were the members of the Constituent Assembly, most of them from the Congress Party that had led the independence struggle, there was no question about it. India must be a democracy. Jawaharlal Nehru – with Gandhi and Patel the third member of the triumvirate that is seen as having led the independence movement, and independent India’s first prime minister – in moving the Resolution on Aims and Objects before the Constituent Assembly, in December 1946, declared: ‘Obviously we are aiming at democracy and nothing less than democracy …’ (CAD, 13 December 1946). The Constitution that was finally drawn up lays down that India is a democracy based on universal adult franchise, embracing women as well as men (and we should remember that women in France had been enfranchised only as recently as 1944, and that Swiss women were not to get the vote until 1971). The first national elections were held in 1952, following an extraordinary bureaucratic effort to register 170 million voters. This effort has been described in detail by Ornit Shani, who argues that democracy was effectively made on the ground, ‘from wrestling with practical problems of implementing the registration of all adults who would be citizens, as voters’ (2018: 252). She explains how the process of operationalizing democracy helped to constitute citizenship, concluding her book with an extended quote from the papers of B. Shiva Rao, who contested one of the parliamentary seats in what was then Madras:

I did not think the untouchables in the rural areas would attach any great importance to the vote. There again I was in serious error. I visited dozens of polling booths all over the constituency on voting day and found in every queue, whether of men or women voters, untouchables in considerable numbers … The experience of standing in the same queue with one’s employer, and the consciousness of having the same political right as the high-caste landlords made, I think, a deep impression on many untouchables (quoted by Shani 2018: 257).

Research by anthropologists across India in the twenty-first century shows how very important participation in elections is for poor people, giving them indeed a sense of themselves as equal citizens of the country, in spite of the very considerable inequalities to which they are subject in their daily lives – and which reduce the practical meaning of citizenship for them (Banerjee 2014; and, on the limitations of citizenship, Chatterjee 2004).

Elections at national and provincial/state levels have been held regularly ever since 1952, generally at intervals of five years, with the important exception of the period between 1975 and 1977, when Nehru’s daughter, India’s third prime minister, Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution and declared Emergency Rule, using powers that had been taken over from the colonial Government of India Act 1935. The history of India’s parliamentary elections, and of the country’s political leadership (summarized in tables 1.3 and 1.4), is a story of the long dominance of the Congress Party (INC) – interrupted only by the short periods in office of the Janata coalition government (1977–80), elected following the Emergency, and then of the Janata Dal government headed by V. P. Singh (1989–90) – and subsequently of the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was a mark of the failure of the Janata government that Indira Gandhi should have been returned to office, in January 1980, so soon after the end of the Emergency; and Mrs Gandhi’s son Rajiv then led the Congress to its greatest electoral victory in December 1984, riding a ‘sympathy wave’ caused by the assassination of his mother.

Rajiv, however, proved a disappointing prime minister, and the later 1980s also saw the BJP winning support partly through successful political theatre surrounding a dispute over an old mosque, the Babri Masjid, in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. Hindu nationalists claimed that the mosque stood on the site of a Hindu temple that marked the birthplace of the god Ram (see chapter 6). This, in our understanding of modern Indian history, was partly instrumental in bringing about a reinvention of India towards the end of the twentieth century, in what we think of as a third moment of historical change. The reinvention of India saw a big shift in economic policy in the direction of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of Hindu nationalism – described by Corbridge and Harriss (2000) as ‘elite revolts’ – together with what was called a ‘second democratic upsurge’ with the emergence of a new generation of political leaders from among the OBCs. From 1989 until 2014, no single party won a majority in national elections, and India was ruled by minority or coalition governments, the latter headed by the BJP (in the National Democratic Alliance) between 1998 and 2004, and by the Congress (in the United Progressive Alliance) between 2004 and 2014. The crushing victory of the BJP in the national elections of 2014 marked the ascendancy of the party. Its absolute hegemony, with the effective taking over of the mainstream of Indian politics by Hindu nationalism, and the emphatic shifting of that mainstream to the right (Palshikar 2015), was confirmed by the even more comprehensive victory that the party won in the 2019 elections. The BJP won more than 50 per cent of the vote in 11 of India’s major states (or 12 if we include also Uttar Pradesh in which the BJP came within a whisker of 50 per cent, see table 1.5), and only in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south, and Punjab in the north, was the party not powerfully represented. The elections of 2014 and 2019 can be described, therefore, as a fourth moment of historical change.

Table 1.3 Distribution of Votes of Major National Parties, Lok Sabha Elections, 1952–2019

SOURCE: Election Commission of India

KEY: BJP = Bharatiya Janata Party; BJS = Bharatiya Jana Sangh; BLD = Bharatiya Lok Dal; BSP = Bahujan Samaj Party; CPI = Communist Party of India; CPM = Communist Party of India (Marxist); INC = Indian National Congress; JD = Janata Dal; JNP = Janata Party

Table 1.4 Distribution of Seats Won in Lok Sabha Elections, by National Party, 1952–2019

SOURCE: Election Commission of India

KEY: see Table 1.3

Table 1.5 National Elections 2019, Vote Share and Seats Won, in Major States, by BJP and Congress

SOURCE: Election Commission of India

	BJP vote share % (seats)	INC vote share % (seats)
Andhra Pradesh	0.96 (0)	—
Assam	36.05 (9)	35.44 (3)
Bihar	23.58 (17)	7.70 (1)
Chhattisgarh	50.70 (9)	40.91 (2)
NCR Delhi	56.56 (7)	22.51 (0)
Goa	51.18 (1)	42.92 (1)
Gujarat	62.21 (26)	32.11 (0)
Haryana	58.02 (10)	28.42 (0)
Himachal Pradesh	69.11 (4)	27.30 (0)
Jammu & Kashmir	46.39 (3)	28.47 (0)
Jharkhand	50.96 (11)	15.63 (1)
Karnataka	51.38 (25)	31.88 (1)
Kerala	12.93 (0)	37.27 (15)
Madhya Pradesh	58.00 (28)	34.50 (1)
Maharashtra	27.59 (23)	16.27 (1)
Odisha	38.37 (8)	13.81 (1)
Punjab	9.63 (2)	40.12 (8)
Rajasthan	58.47 (24)	34.24 (0)
Tamil Nadu	3.66 (0)	12.76 (8)
Telengana	19.45 (4)	29.48 (3)
Uttar Pradesh	49.56 (62)	6.31 (1)
Uttarakhand	61.01 (5)	31.40 (0)
West Bengal	40.25 (18)	5.61 (2)

But how has democracy worked, in what has remained a country in which the population is largely rural, and in which – in spite of dramatic economic growth since the 1980s – not much less than a half of the labour force is still employed in agriculture? In the 1950s and early 1960s, in the era of what is sometimes referred to as the Nehruvian state, because of the dominance of Jawaharlal Nehru, India had a ‘dominant party’ system of government, in which one party, the Congress, usually won elections at all levels, even in an open, multi-party democracy. This reflected its authority, as the political party born of the successful movement for independence, and the fact that it had an organization that extended both across the country and from the centre down to local levels. Detailed studies showed, however, that the party mobilized support through intermediaries, at local levels usually from among the dominant landowning communities (as we noted earlier), and that it functioned through a great pyramid of patron–client relations (Manor 1988). The intermediation of political leaders at different levels, and clientelism, have remained highly significant in Indian politics, and the labelling of India as a ‘patronage democracy’ is a powerful idea (see chapters 7 and 8). The writer most associated with it, Kanchan Chandra, has shown, too, how and why ethnicity plays an important part in Indian politics (Chandra 2004). Many people are most likely to trust someone from their own community. Mobilization has often taken place on the basis of group identities, and the objective of political leaders has often been to win resources from the state for their own people (see chapter 8). Politics has become more and more of a kind of business in which sometimes thuggish individuals with known criminal backgrounds have become increasingly important (as we discuss in chapters 7 and 8). There is, in some parts of the country certainly, where criminal bosses exercise considerable power, what has been called ‘mafia raj’ (Michelutti et al. 2019). These are problems in the way in which democracy works in the country. They follow from the paradox of India’s democratization that Barrington Moore noted.

One of Narendra Modi’s claims, following the 2019 elections, was that he and his party had won their great majority because they had successfully transcended caste and community-based voting, and there was support for this argument in the findings of post-poll surveys conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. But it was reported (The Hindu, 28 May 2019, referring to calculations by the Association of Democratic Reforms) that 43 per cent of the newly elected MPs had criminal records (and that 29 per cent of them had records including serious crimes) compared with ‘only’ 34 per cent in 2014. The extent to which Modi has really made a difference to the modalities of electoral mobilization in India remains uncertain.