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Journalism of Courage
Between December 1951 and February 1952, independent India held its first elections, both to the House of the People (or the Lok Sabha) and the State Legislative Assemblies. This continued until the late 1960s, when unstable non-Congress state governments began to fall, leading to midterm elections and thus, a disruption in the pattern of joint elections to the Lok Sabha and the states.
It was, however, the 1971 general elections that marked a clean break from the earlier practice of simultaneous polls. The elections were originally scheduled for 1972, but Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, keen to make the polls a referendum on her populist measures, chose to advance the dates by an entire year. This separated the national and state schedules since the terms of many legislative assemblies were yet to end.
In a paper in the journal Asian Survey in 1971, American political scientist Myron Weiner points out that the decline in the performance of the Congress in 1967 “followed a period of drought, rising prices, two wars, the deaths of two Prime Ministers (Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri), growing corruption, and an unpopular decision to devalue the rupee”.
Another factor that challenged the notion of the Congress’s invincibility was some deft electoral arrangements since 1963 among non-Congress parties and groupings. In UP in 1967, the Jana Sangh rose to 98 seats, riding on the back of the march of sadhus to Parliament seeking a national ban on cow slaughter.
Soon, Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) governments, formed by Opposition parties such as the Jana Sangh, socialists, the Swatantra Party and the Communists, came up in a number of states, including UP and Bihar. But these and other unstable governments, weighed down by their own contradictions and the might of the Congress, soon began to fall, forcing Haryana, Bihar, Nagaland, Punjab, UP and West Bengal to hold mid-term elections.
While this was the first disruption to the simultaneous poll schedule, it was Indira Gandhi’s decision to hold the Lok Sabha elections in 1971 that completely disrupted the cycle.
When Indira Gandhi took over the Congress following the deaths of Nehru and Shastri, the party not only had a shrinking footprint but the old guard wasn’t willing to give her a free run.
In 1969, Indira Gandhi split the Congress and effectively ended the factionalism within the party by getting a larger share of Congressmen on her side and staying afloat with the support of the CPI, DMK and others in Parliament. She had taken a populist turn to the Left, nationalising banks and abolishing privy purses to former princes by an executive order. When the Supreme Court quashed the abolition of the privy purses, she sought the dissolution of the Lok Sabha, choosing to go to the people for endorsement of her policies.
“Since Indira Gandhi’s opponents in the Congress (O) controlled the party organisations in many key states… she needed to create an electoral arena where national issues and her charismatic personality could mobilise electoral support directly without relying on the local party machines,” writes Csaba Nikolenyi of Concordia University in an academic paper published in 2010 in the journal Political Studies.
US political scientist and author Lloyd Rudolph wrote in the Asian Survey in December 1971, “Mrs. Gandhi’s intention in holding a snap, delinked election was to produce a national referendum on her policies and leadership”.
Weiner writes, “Paradoxically, the opposition parties contributed to Mrs. Gandhi’s efforts to turn the electorate towards national issues. By singling out Mrs. Gandhi as the prime target (and without offering any national leader as an alternative), they supported the efforts of Mrs. Gandhi’s supporters to make her a national leader.”
Indeed, the 1971 Lok Sabha elections saw the Congress, with a few allies, trouncing a grand alliance of opposition parties to secure 350 Lok Sabha seats with 43 per cent votes.
Writing about the effect of non-simultaneous elections on voter turnout, Rudolf notes that in 1971, when the states and the Lok Sabha voted separately, the voter turnout was 55.25%, down from 1967, when elections were held simultaneously. “The decline in participation broke the upward secular trend (in voter turnout) that prevailed between the first general election in 1952 (45.7%) and the fourth in 1967 (61.3%),” he says.
Nikolenyi says the delinking of the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls would signal the rise of regional parties in India. “The separation of national and sub-national electoral cycles facilitated the emergence and proliferation of state-based and regional parties that benefited from the isolation of national issues from the local electoral context,” he says.
Indeed, much later, the rise of regional parties and the decline of the Congress after 1990 — accompanied by the rise of the BJP as a national player — would lead to the Lok Sabha polls witnessing electoral arrangements between the two national parties and different regional parties, thus keeping the state parties relevant even on the national stage.
Nikolenyi points out that Canada and Australia have consciously maintained a separation of national and state elections “as a safeguard that protects the autonomy of the two levels of government in federal states”.
