Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 56

Indian Politics & Policy
questions including the government’s
many welfare schemes affected voter
preferences across classes. Coming to
the conclusion that economic conditions
as felt by the voters and the government’s
schemes did not produce major
class differences in voter preferences
toward parties, the question arises as to
what explains the fairly uniform party
preferences across classes. The paper
then proceeds to look at broader questions
of attitudes to leadership, nationalism,
and minorities that might affect
voting patterns in a way that produces
relatively small differences across classes.
Finally, bringing in findings from
the comparative literature on why poor
voters vote on the same lines as the better-off,
and on recent patterns of class
self-identification in India, at the end
of the paper, I try to, somewhat speculatively,
explain the above results from
the dataset.
Defining Class in the
Indian Electorate
Table 1: Economic Class of Voters in 2019
Economic Class Figures (%)
Poor 30
Lower 34
Middle 22
Rich 14
Total 100
Source: National Election Study (NES) (2019)
The Lokniti survey groups 24,235
respondents into four classes—
Rich, Middle, Lower, and Poor—
based on a composite index of income,
house type, occupation, and occupational
level. This results in a breakdown
by class of 13.6 percent Rich, 22.1 percent
Middle, 34.1 percent Lower, and
30.2 percent Poor (Table 1). Compared
to 2014, the Rich slightly increased
from 11 percent to 14 percent, the Middle
Class shrank considerably from 36
percent to 22 percent, the Lower class is
about the same at about one-third, and
the Poor increased from 20 percent to
30 percent, much higher than the those
below the official poverty line in 2011
(22 percent). 1 Since in a poor country of
approximately $2000 per capita GDP, 14
percent of the population of over 1300
million would give us a huge figure of
about 182 million people or more, only
a small fraction would be recognizably
rich in a serious sense, even by Indian
standards, let alone world standards.
Another perhaps more meaningful way
of looking at the breakdown is to lump
the Rich and Middle classes together as
Upper-Middle and Middle class. In this
case, we get a combined Upper-Middle
and Middle class of 36 percent, much
lower than the corresponding 47 percent
of 2014, despite presumed upward
mobility due to five years of 6–7 percent
growth and a Poor class of 30 percent
compared to 20 percent in 2014.
This does not fit well with the latest income-cum-occupational
estimate of India’s
Middle class (28.1 percent in 2012,
according to Aslany, with a Rich class
of only 0.8 percent). 2 Hence, the 2014
and 2019 breakdowns, to say nothing
of 2009, are not comparable except
very roughly in terms of relativities,
but not even then. So we will consider
2019 on its own without attempting
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