In the overview chapter, “The elusive mandate of 2004”, Yogendra Yadav sets the tone for the book by voicing his impatience of “the genre of instant political commentaries” with its often futile search for a national mandate in electoral verdicts. The immediate wisdom after the outcome of the 2004 general election was that the Congress-led coalition had won a decisive mandate against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance and the policies it pursued while in office. Interrogation of the election data, however, revealed this to be a hasty conclusion.

Indeed, Yadav rejects the popular explanations for the 2004 verdict, arguing that these arose from the “initial sense of utter surprise” at the Congress coalition’s victory. The dazzle of the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign had led a section of commentators, and the party itself, to assume that the NDA was on a hat trick. In the event, the defeat of the NDA led to the opposite interpretation — that the alliance had been punished for taking the side of the rich against the poor. The BJP was also thought to have paid a price for its anti-minorities stance. Conversely, the Congress’ victory was attributed to its pro-poor and liberal-secular-pluralist politics.

Yadav contends that these were oversimplifications of an essentially “hung” verdict, citing the share of votes and seats secured by various alliances. Though (compared to 1999) the Congress improved its seat tally by 31 to secure 145 seats in 2004, its vote share actually fell by 1.9 percentage points. The Congress and its allies won 221 seats for a combined vote share of 36.5 per cent — an increase of just 1.6 percentage points over the vote share of the Congress and its 1999 allies. Overall, the UPA (36.5 per cent) had a vote share lead of only 0.6 percentage point over the NDA (35.9 per cent). This did not indicate a “swell of popular support” for the Congress alliance; nor did it constitute a “mandate to rule.” Having dismissed the “national mandate” theory, Yadav argues that, from the 1990s, the States have emerged as the “primary arena of political contestation,” and the national elections have now tended to be “no more than an aggregation of State-level verdicts” — a trend reinforced by the 1998 and 1999 verdicts. Thus there is “some merit in looking at the (2004) Lok Sabha elections as 28 State-wise electoral races being run simultaneously.”

Many of the State-specific essays have been expanded since they were first written, obviously in the light of the post-2004 changes and trends. The chapter on Uttar Pradesh devotes considerable space to the inclusive politics of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. The concluding essay by Yadav and Suhas Palshikar charts the electoral trends between 2004 and 2009, examining them in the context of the “third electoral system” — characterised by the shift of political action to the States following the decline of the Congress. They argue that 2004 was “not an aberration” but carried the systemic attributes of the “third electoral system.” Rather than represent a common “national mood,” national electoral outcomes now increasingly “reflect an equilibrium of political forces that happens to obtain” at the time a general election is called.

Notwithstanding the book’s immense contribution to our understanding of the electoral processes, and the painstaking research evident in the essays, a caveat must be entered. The 2004 election was first analysed by Yadav and his co-editors in a supplement brought out by The Hindu on May 20, 2004. Contrary to his assertion in the book that the 2004 verdict was neither “dramatic” nor “stunning,” Yadav then took the line that the “stunning verdict” signified “a fundamental change in Indian democracy.”

To quote: “Elections 2004 may be remembered not for its realignment of political forces and experiments in coalition building, but for a more basic realignment of social and political power. The verdict signifies a radical shift in the social basis of political power.”

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