The Dawn (2019)

[Gano Richardson]

A 12 hour, overnight challenge in which runners complete a 3.21 mile circuit around Manvers Lake. The course itself leaves from the lakeside front and progresses towards the Trans Pennine Way for approx. 1 mile. A short sharp turn brings you alongside a residential area and back into the grounds of the lake to the starting point. The route is mainly flat.

When I was encouraged to enter this I did feel a bit out of my comfort zone. Although I have done a couple of ultras, none have been through the night. In fact I have never run at night! The quirky bit of this run is that though you have 12 hours you are not forced to undertake a set distance. Run as many or as few laps as you want.

Although I was feeling good with the running I could feel blisters on the feet (due to the wet?) and my tummy started to grumble. But tea supped and a few snacks eaten, change of socks out I went again. By this time it was dark and the head torch was definitely needed. Strange but I did get used to this. I managed a further 3 laps before the stomach cramps took over and I made the decision to have a break.

Approx 3.30am and I was feeling more refreshed, I headed out slipping and sliding and managed to fall over! No injuries but set off at slower pace and appreciated that dawn was beginning to break. I managed a further 3 laps. I finished at 5.30am as I was unsure if I would make another full lap in the 30 mins left, given the conditions.

While most political analysts expected the BJP to return to power with relative ease, very few anticipated the magnitude of the victory. The BJP won 303 seats (out of 543) in the Lok Sabha, while its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won a whopping 353 seats in total.11 In cruising to victory, the BJP bested its historic 2014 performance in which it earned 282 seats on its own while its alliance clinched 336 seats in all. Conversely, the result produced yet another disappointment for the opposition Indian National Congress, which won a paltry 52 seats (just 8 better than its 2014 total).

First, the absence of a central pole in national politics between 1989 and 2009 is perhaps the central feature of the third party system. Although the Congress played that role for decades, after 1989 it no longer had the breadth and depth of support required to define the system. Although the BJP would soon emerge as the only other truly national party to give the Congress a serious fight across multiple states, it too had limitations of demography, geography, and ideology.

Third, electoral contests became markedly more competitive on nearly every dimension. Victory margins came down and the share of candidates winning an outright majority of votes in their constituencies dropped. It became commonplace for candidates to emerge as victorious members of parliament (MPs) with only a plurality, as opposed to a majority, of votes in their constituency.21

Fourth, the entire political system became highly federalized. National elections were no longer truly national in nature; they were more akin to a collection of state-level verdicts. State and national elections also exhibited a clear, interactive pattern. National-level outcomes were directly influenced by the state-level verdicts that preceded them, but the intensity of the effect depended on the proximity of the two polls. Honeymoon and anti-incumbency effects at the state level directly impacted national polls.

Fifth, voter turnout surged at the state level while national political mobilization cooled. As states became the primary venues for political contestation, voter turnout patterns shifted in kind. In the third party system, the gap between voter turnout at the state and national levels saw unprecedented divergence.

Finally, there was a clear change in the social composition of the representative class. For instance, in northern Hindi belt states, the combined share of OBC and SC legislators superseded that of upper caste and intermediate castes for the very first time.

However, after 1977, margins steadily came down over a period of several decades. By 2009, the average margin of victory sunk to its lowest level in the postindependence era: 9.7 percent. This was just barely lower than the 1998 and 1999 polls, when the margins were 10 percent in consecutive elections.

Some, though not all, of these dynamics have shifted after 2014. For starters, the format of state-level competition still continues to shape national politics in that state. Furthermore, the levels of turnout in state and national elections continue to demonstrate a strong correlation.39 However, there has been divergence on the other two counts.

In 2014, the BJP won 88 percent of head-to-head contests with the Congress Party and 91 percent of direct contests with regional, caste-based parties, but just 28 percent of races against regionalist parties (see figure 16). In 2019, the BJP once again dominated in straight fights with both the Congress and regional parties. But it also greatly improved its position vis--vis regionalist players, winning 50 percent of all battles where the two faced off. These gains came in states like Odisha, Telangana, and West Bengal.

From this perspective, 2014 exhibits a clear break in voter turnout, when India recorded its highest turnout, at 66.4 percent. This degree of voter mobilization was undoubtedly a reflection of two factors: widespread frustration with the incumbent Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime and the excitement around the candidacy of Narendra Modi. Related evidence shows that areas that saw the highest turnout were precisely those constituencies where the BJP vote surged.47 In 2019, voter turnout would notch yet another record: according to data provided by the Election Commission of India (ECI), 67.2 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. An average turnout of 66.8 percent in the past two elections demonstrates a clear break with the third party system and what came before. And, once more, the increase in turnout appears to have helped the BJP in 2019. For example, the BJP-led NDA won 87 percent of seats where turnout increased by more than 5 percent from its 2014 level but only 29 percent of seats where turnout decreased by more than 5 percent from 2014.

The gap between national turnout and state turnout is also narrowing. Prior to the start of the third system, national turnout regularly exceeded state turnout (see figure 18). In the coalition era, state turnout skyrocketed while national turnout remained steady. By the mid-2000s, state turnout was exceeding national turnout by an average of 10 percentage points. This gap has shrunk, however, to less than 4 percent between 2013 and 2017.

Caste has been an ever-present reality in Indian politics in the postindependence era (and even before). However, the way in which caste has been expressed and mobilized politically has not remained constant. As Yadav points out in his seminal study, in the first electoral system, the most salient social category for politics was jati (one of thousands of discrete caste groups that reside within the umbrella categories of upper caste, OBC, SC, and so on).

In Bihar, the BJP also pursued a similar strategy in an effort to dampen support for the opposition RJD, which is another party seen as favoring the Yadav community. According to CSDS data, 55 percent of Yadavs stuck with the RJD and its alliance partners.54 But the other OBC groups decisively swung toward the NDA. Because the upper castes are core supporters of the BJP across the board, winning over these new jati groups provided the crucial swing vote in favor of the BJP.

In the 2014 and 2019 general election campaigns, the party selectively deployed Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) in parts of the country where the party felt it would help consolidate their electoral base.59 Over the past two decades, the BJP has made sincere efforts at broadening its demographic base beyond a small sliver of Hindu upper castes and trading communities to include Dalits (Scheduled Castes), OBCs, and Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes). One way in which it has sought to do this is by using memes such as Ram Mandir (the temple to Lord Ram many Hindus would like to build in Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid once stood), cow protection, and illegal immigration to transcend caste divisions among Hindus. In sections of the Hindi belt and in border districts in Assam and West Bengal, for instance, the party did not hesitate to embrace its traditional bona fides as a strident, pro-Hindu vehicle.

The dawn of this fourth party system raises important questions that deserve greater exploration by political scientists in the years to come. For starters, how do economic indicators shape voting behavior? For decades, it was believed that good economics did not make for good politics in India.83 Or, in other words, incumbents did not reap any direct electoral rewards from superior economic performance. According to several assessments, things began to change in 2000s such that economic and electoral performance became mutually reinforcing. For the first time, voters appeared to be punishing incumbents who presided over periods of weaker economic growth and rewarding those who did the opposite.84

Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior.

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