Electoral Politics in Bihar and Orissa: a Comparative Perspective
PUBLISHED IN Rob Jenkins (ed), Regional Reflections: Comparing Politics Across India’s States Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004. JANATA REGIONALIZED: CONTRASTING BASES OF ELECTORAL SUPPORT IN BIHAR AND ORISSA Sanjay Kumar1 1 Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Introduction The reordering of India’s electoral landscape during the 1990s has thrown up an array of analytical puzzles for psephologists and other observers of Indian politics. One subset of issues stems from the regionalization of party politics – or, more precisely, from the need to explain inter-state variations between the numerous state- level ‘descendant’ parties that broke away from national ‘parent’ organisations to form autonomous regional parties. The centre-left Janata Party, which emerged following Indira Gandhi’s declaration of National Emergency in the mid-70s, and ultimately succeeded Mrs Gandhi as part of a short-lived coalition government, has been in a state of perpetual disintegration from its very inception. But Janata’s successor national party, the Janata Dal, began to fragment even more heavily than usual in the early 1990s: in addition to the usual ideological and factional disputes, the party was also becoming regionalised – composed of distinct state-level units. Ironically, this disintegration followed immediately upon the party’s high point of historical significance: the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations on enhanced affirmative action for lower castes in central government employment (see chapter by Jaffrelot and Zerinini-Brotel in this volume). To be sure, many of the state-level ‘mini-Janatas’ – such as the Janata Dal (D), a Rajput-dominated faction of the early 1990s that, almost by coincidence, adopted the Janata franchise in Rajasthan at that moment – died out quickly.
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