The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections
“Democracy lies at the very core of every Indian’s DNA”, writes Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala, one of the most well-known faces of election forecasting, in their latest book, just before the Lok Sabha election 2019. The book is a comprehensive review of all elections held in India since 1952.
Did you know that between 1952 and 1977, 82% of the elections saw governments voted back into power? And then the honeymoon of incumbent governments got over. Between 1977 and 2002, only 29% of governments could win the election. Hence the term “anti-incumbency”. But, the most interesting piece comes after 2002, when it is 50-50 chance of incumbents coming back to power. Roy and Sopariwala, call it the phase of “wise voter”.
The book is an excellent primer on Election Data Analytics, organized in five parts, with three chapters each in the first four-part and one chapter in the final part. The parts cover threads ranging from “turning points in India’s elections” to “how to forecast elections” to the vexing issues of “divide and rule” where the authors delve upon fundamental dichotomies of how big parties manipulated elections and whether our elections are truly representative? It challenges the commonly held wisdom of ”Dalit factor”, “Women factor”, “Muslim factor”, “Christian factor” and several others and their impact on elections.
The authors make a serious point on missing women voters by combining population data (sex ratio at 18 of 972) and sex ratio basis 2019 state elections data of 927, which points to missing 45 women voters per 1000 men voters. This translates to missing 2.1 Cr women voters. This is a crying shame for democracy.
The book is timely not only for 2019 elections but also has the potential to serve as essential reading for anyone who wants to make a career in psephology.