Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 40

Indian Politics & Policy
Table 1: Voters prioritization of issues in election, 2009 (in percentages)
Issues in the election Not Heard Heard
Affected decision
to vote
Made no difference
to the vote
Price Increase 27 48 23
Terrorist Attacks 34 39 24
Livelihood/Employment 46 34 21
Farmer Suicides 49 28 21
Reservations for OBCs 56 22 19
Indo-US Nuclear Deal 59 18 21
Ram-Setu Controversy 64 17 18
Source: Authors’ calculation based on Lokniti-CSDS NES 2009.
N=36629. Heard = Affected decision to vote, Made no difference to the vote, and No opinion
After the general election of
2009, the NES asked voters’ opinions
about seven issues that seemed to have
been relevant in the election year. 23
While expressing their solidarity with
some of the issues, Table 1 shows that
almost 60 percent of Indian voters had
never heard about the Indo-US nuclear
deal, 64 percent had not heard of the
Ram Setu controversy, about five out of
10 voters considered price increase to
be an issue that affected their vote preference,
and close to 40 percent of voters
believed incidents of terrorist attacks in
2009 influenced their voting. In relation
to the general election of 2009, Rai observes
that those respondents who considered
price increase, terrorist attacks,
farmer suicides, and employment to be
important issues tended to vote less for
the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
(as compared to those who said these
were not an issue), since these issues
were raised by the opposition parties to
discredit the UPA. 24
In the past two general elections
held in 2014 and 2019, the NES asked
the following direct question: What was
the single most important issue for you
while voting in this election? In 2014, 78
percent of the voters responded to this
question by naming a specific issue that
they thought had affected their voting
choice (76 percent in 2019). Table 2
provides an insight into the responses
of this question from 2014 and 2019,
and a similar question was asked in
2009. While price increase and unemployment
remained two of the most
important issues in both general elections,
corruption was second place in
2014. This was a reflection of a series of
corruption charges against the incumbent
UPA government, and the opposition
National Democratic Alliance
(NDA) led by the BJP cashing in on it
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