BJP's anti-redistributive politics, gender quotas, 'new welfarism' and more

Excerpts from CASI Election Conversations 2024

Welcome back to India Inside Out.

There has been a lot going on in India, much of which I’ve been meaning to write on but simply haven’t had the time to, though I’ve had a chance to cover some of it on The Election Tricycle, the podcast I co-host, which tracks elections in the US, UK, India and beyond.

This week on the show, we spoke to Manisha Pande, managing editor of Newslaundry and host of TV Newsance, a satirical YouTube show that tracks and skewers Indian television news. Pande gave us a glimpse of how the mainstream news media in India is an enthusiastic participant in the government’s propaganda machine, and how the rhetoric encouraged by primetime anchors has real-life consequences.

Last week on the show, we looked at the question of student politics – both in terms of protests on college campuses in the US, and how they fit into broader electoral narratives, as well as how those are being seen by observers and actors in India and the UK. Listen here.

There is much to be written about and linked to on the elections front in India, not least given the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rhetoric taking an even sharper turn over the last few days (including Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking voters for more than 400 seats to ensure that the Congress doesn’t select more Muslims for India’s cricket team, further efforts to create Opposition-free spaces, and – remarkably – Modi accusing the Congress of taking “sacks of black money” from Adani-Ambani, the two richest business families in the country, who are generally closely associated with the prime minister himself).

But on today’s edition I’m going to be pointing you to a bit of work I’ve been doing over at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, at the University of Pennsylvania, where our CASI Election Conversations 2024 series has sought to unearth a deeper understanding of Indian politics and political economy from the most insightful scholars working on the subject. Earlier, I linked to our conversation with Louise Tillin (Professor of Politics at the India Institute, King’s College London) on how Indian federalism has evolved under the BJP.

Since then, we’ve spoken to:

Yamini Aiyar (public policy scholar and former president of the Centre for Policy Research) on the BJP’s “Techno-Patrimonial” Welfare Model:

“What I'm trying to grapple with is not just the contemporary political moment but also what the evolution of India's welfare state tells us about the terms of the social contract, as well as about the nature of our democracy. So, it's been interesting to hear people's feedback in trying to understand the historical framework of India's post-independence attempt at building a welfare state and how this intersects with ideas of citizenship.

Right now, by the way, we can only cite claims of efficiency. We don't know because we don't have good data. In the old days, there were a lot of evaluations that laid bare the good, bad, and ugly of government schemes. Given the research environment in which we find ourselves today, there is a paucity of good evaluations. So, we don't have a good sense of what is happening on the ground.

I think the thing that people puzzle over the most, and to be honest, so do I, is, if this is working and if benefits are reaching people, then should we not be satisfied with that? And to that, my response is, are we really risking our democracy by allowing ourselves to marvel at the ability of the state to just deliver some cash into some people's bank accounts? Is that all that we are expecting the state to do?

What is our social contract? Are we really looking to build a society that is anchored in values of fraternity, which is core to our constitution? Are we looking to build a society that is fundamentally about values of equality that build solidarities across communities, that recognizes the importance of investing in all of us? Or are we a society that's just going to bask in the glory of this very limited achievement, enabled by the marvels of technology—that we are able to deliver small amounts of money into individual bank accounts and say that that's good enough state capacity for me, and that is a good enough aspiration for me?”

Rachel Brulé (Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University) on the Promise and Pitfalls of Gender Quotas in Indian Politics:

“I think the cautious optimists are winning. From my work as well as others’, we see that reservations really do have the power to fundamentally disrupt broader systems of power in much more holistic ways than I think early work gave them credit for. But I call the “winning” camp cautious optimists because we also see with these meaningful shifts or disruptions in gendered political power, massive backlash that extends across generations. Where women are able to access equal inheritance rights that are negotiated through elected officials, we see parents—women and men—being more likely to carry out female infanticide, so we see fewer women in future generations.

I don't think we can say optimists win in an absolute sense with the stakes being that high, but I think it suggests cautious optimism, where we take seriously the impact of disrupting power and realize that there isn't a silver bullet to bringing about gender equity. But this requires thoughtful, incremental, meaningful engagement with the women who seek to benefit from these changes and engaging with them in ways that ensure that not only they benefit, but everyone in their families and communities benefit. This is possible, but it requires more holistic interventions than we've been willing to conduct to date and more holistic forms of support than I think states—whether this is the Indian case or others—have been willing to commit to for the most part.”

Pavithra Suryanarayan (Assistant Professor in the Government Department at the LSE) on the BJP, “Social Status,” and Anti-Redistributive Politics:

“If you want to understand redistributive politics in some countries, you need to take two things seriously. The first is that the contestation in politics doesn’t only hinge on material redistribution, it can hinge on rank or social status.

The second is that we focus overtly on representation in the political arena, which is fighting elections and putting an MLA or an MP into office, and then we say, “job done." But in fact, the arena that might truly matter is the state itself. Control of the bureaucracy and bureaucratic capacity might be important to certain groups in a society.

Historically in many places like India, the United States, South Africa, etc., the state has been key to not only providing security and taxes, but has been key to social organization. In these countries, the state was central in allowing segregation to continue. Integrating the state can create a backlash that reverberates in politics.

I have a paper on the American South on how the end of the Civil War produced this backlash as African Americans were emancipated and made claims on redistribution, and many of them made claims through becoming part of the state. African Americans became not just voters and representatives, they became census enumerators and local bureaucrats. What followed was a period of backlash against the state, which led to weakened state capacity and a deliberate attempt to keep the state weak in order to limit its welfare ability.

The book spells out how the increased salience of a social status identity leads to anti-redistributive politics. We observe anti-redistributive politics in three ways. First, at the micro level, it lowers individual level support for redistribution amongst high status groups. Second, at a meso level, it weakens state capacity, particularly bureaucratic capacity. Third, at a macro level, it changes coalitions of voters in the political landscape, making it possible now for right-wing parties to gain new constituents who are worried about protecting their social status and not just their income or their ethnicity.”

Francesca R. Jensenius (Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo) on Misconceptions About the Indian Voter:

“We do see that partisans vote in a more stable manner than others. In fact, if they don’t vote for the party they feel close to it is because the party isn't on the ballot. Often these voters don't care much about who the candidate is, they care more about the party. Using the measure of partisanship we have discussed above, that's 30 percent of the voters.

But then, in other work, I have focused on the group of people who are not loyal to any party or candidate and that is also a large chunk of the voters. If you look at the National Election Studies, a large share of voters say they have been in touch with a party around the time of the election campaign, but it's far from all. Many voters are, in fact, never in touch with parties during the campaign or otherwise.And if you ask whether they've seen the campaign on radio or TV or anything, they also say no. Many of these people also have limited or no education, meaning that it’s not likely they're Googling political information either.

And so, a large part of the population has very limited connection to political parties or politics at all. If you look at voting patterns, the evidence suggests that these are the voters who really jump around from election to election. Some of this volatility might be in response to handouts or shifting alliances, but many of them also seem to try to use their hope for political change, but often based on limited information. I do think it's the case that a lot of voters keep trying new parties in the hope that they'll get more in return. And that is what democratic accountability is about—you try to vote for someone who would give you something more.

So, we see massive vote swings in Indian elections. And I think that's important to bear in mind when you look at the pattern now of BJP dominance at the national level, or even Congress dominance previously, that the vote shares that bring them to power are never very high. I know the Opposition has harped on the BJP winning with just 37 percent. What is more important to keep in mind even when talking about 37 percent is that this is out of the 68 percent of voters who turned out to vote. And that percentage is out of eligible voters, which is far from the entire population. So, the share of the population that voted for the BJP in the 2019 elections was actually not that high, but because of the First Past the Post System, one can win the majority of seats with a small share of votes. And the more fragmented the vote is locally, the more you can win with small percentages.

This is not new. If you look at Indian elections historically, it's never been the case that any party has gotten a massive vote share. The Congress party also won with less than 50 percent of the vote most of the time. It's always been a fairly low share of the Indian population that have brought politicians to power.

If you look at the vote shares that go to parties other than Congress and the BJP, those also jump around. I've had a project where I looked at polling station level data. If you look at how much parties’ votes swing from one election to the next, it's quite impressive. It's not the case that villages generally vote together or the same from one election to the next.

Even if you look at data from the Uttar Pradesh State Assembly elections in 2022, you can see that it's not the same places that supported BJP in high numbers from one election to the next. Parties generally can't take their vote for granted in most areas. And so, they have to work hard to string together a winning coalition in any constituency. So, the volatility and fragmentation are present at the same time as you have a chunk of voters who are quite loyal, both things are happening at the same time.”

There are more interviews still to come, which I’ll be linking to on the newsletter, and hopefully I’ll have some time to write out pieces and send you links to useful writing on the elections as well some time over the next week, before India Inside Out goes on a short break.

As always, we end with:

Can’t Make This Up

NYPD sounding a lot like Delhi Police:

Thanks for reading. Sending suggestions, links and ‘Can’t Make This Up’ ideas to rohan.venkat AT gmail.com.