Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 8

Indian Politics & Policy
bate as to whether this is the beginning
of the end of the dominance of regional
parties in the North Indian states 7 or
a passing phase in Indian elections. If
this decline in the importance of the
regional parties is largely related to national
elections, could there be a reversal
in the trend during state assembly
elections?
Various articles in this special
issue of the journal attempt to focus
on some important questions arising
from this verdict. First and foremost,
these articles try to explain how and
why the BJP managed to register such
a resounding victory. Is it because of
the work done by the BJP government
during last five years, or should this verdict
be seen as a vote for Narendra Modi
more than anything else? How did the
voters of India respond to the aggressive
nationalist campaign launched by
the ruling BJP? Did the welfare schemes
help the BJP in making inroads among
the rural poor and female voters? Did
the laws against triple talaq help the
BJP make inroads among Muslim voters
or make it even somewhat more acceptable
among Muslim voters? Where
did Congress fail? Why was Congress
unable to make any impact among its
voters? Was that a leadership failure or
something else?
The result of the 2019 election
signifies that the BJP made further inroads
among rural voters, keeping its
urban vote bank intact. It also gained in
its base in semi-urban constituencies.
The vote-share of the BJP increased by
6.8 percent in rural constituencies, by
3.5 percent in semi-urban constituencies,
and by 2.2 percent in urban constituencies.
Various welfare schemes of the
BJP government aimed at the welfare of
people living in rural India seemed to
have paid dividends to the party. The
analysis by Siddharth Swaminathan,
“Understanding Voting Patterns by
Class in the 2019 Indian Election,” provides
a detailed account of how the BJP
managed to win the 2019 Lok Sabha
elections, including factors that contributed
to its victory. While there may
be overstatement about how much the
welfare scheme helped the BJP make
further inroads among poor voters, but
evidence from the Lokniti-CSDS postpoll
survey suggests that voters who
benefitted from the schemes voted for
the BJP in much bigger numbers compared
to those who did not benefit. The
article “Do Issues Matter in Indian Elections”
by Prashant Kumar Choudhary,
Reetika Syal, and Tarun Arora provides
us with some nuanced analysis on these
issues. E Sridharan, in his article “Understanding
voting patterns by Class in
the 2019 Lok Sabha elections,” takes a
deep dive looking at the voting patterns
across class. The analysis of National
Election Study (NES) 2019 data suggests
that the BJP for the first time took
the lead over Congress even among the
poor and the lower economic classes of
voters. The rich and middle classes have
voted for the BJP in very large numbers
for the last several elections, but during
the 2019 Lok Sabah elections, the BJP
made massive inroads among voters
belonging to the poor economic class,
especially the rural poor and the lower
economic class.
The BJP’s expanded base of support
is also credited to the inroads it
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