Indian Voting Behaviour- Studies of the 1962 General Elections (An Old and Rare Book)

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Twelve scholars and journalists report on the voting patterns of seven urban and four rural constituencies in India's third general elections. Each study pro- vides an analysis of how various social and economic groups in the constituencies cast their votes. They examine the role of caste, occupation, religious, linguistic, kinship and factional ties in determining the way individuals voted. The rural studies pay special attention to the growing political importance of self-cultivating landowners who have a great personal stake in local administration and development activities. The importance of party control of panchayats, municipalities, trade unions, gurdwaras and other structures of local authority in the outcome of assembly and parliamentary election is also examined.

The contributors make extensive use of voting data as well as their intimate knowledge of the constituencies in which they conducted field investigations during and after the elections.

Myron Weiner is Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Senior Research Associate at its Center for International Studies. He has done extensive field work in India since 1953, and has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Social Science Research Council and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In the past he has been a consultant to the Ford Foundation and is now serving as a consultant to the Department of State. He is the author of The Politics of Scarcity (1962) and Party Politics in India (1957), as well as Political Change in South Asia, and co-author of The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960).

In December 1961 I sent letters to a number of Indian academics, journalists and writers, and several American political scientists and anthropologists then doing research in India inviting them to participate in a study of India's forthcoming third general elections. I suggested that each contributor conduct field research in one constituency-either for the legislative assembly or for the national parliament and report, not so much on the techniques of the candidates or the mechanics of the elections, but rather on the factors which affected the way in which Indians cast their ballots. I urged each contributor no matter what else he included in his report to provide us with detailed statistical data on how various social or economic groups in the constituency, or selected portions of the constituency, voted. On the basis of this data he could then report to us what he knew of the dynamics of voting.

Eight contributors, including the editor, agreed to write such reports. Earlier versions of these were all published in Economic Weekly in mid-1962, and three more were added to this collection some time later. It was our hope that these studies might together illuminate what is now predominantly speculation: how largely illiterate voters in a predominantly traditional society exercise their right to vote. It was also our conviction that national survey research studies, such as those conducted by the Indian Institute of Public Opinion, could provide only limited answers to this question. In the largely segmented and highly parochial social system which predominates in most of rural (and even urban) India, the patterns of loyalties and interests and the power structures which prevail at the village or neighbourhood level are often the most important elements of political action and can often more readily be studied through anthropological-type field inquiries than through national surveys.