Appearance and Reality in Indian Politics: Making Sense of the 1999 General Election

Abstract

IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT INDIA'S POLITICS ARE NEVER QUITE WHAT THEY seem. If ever there were a banal statement about the collective life of a people this would have to qualify. The politics of any country, almost by definition, fails to represent the daily lives and struggles of ordinary people, and in most cases even the strivings of politicians themselves. Democratic politics is at least as much about distortion as representation – the projection of images to appeal to electorates, for instance, or the softening of policy stances to accommodate seemingly incompatible coalition partners. But ‘national’ politics in India, by which I mean the competition among political elites for control or inf luence over the institutions of the central state, is currently less representative than in any other non-authoritarian country one could imagine. Paradoxically, this is the result of a deepening, rather than a withering, of India's democracy – in particular, the tendency for marginalized groups to seek power on their own terms, through parties explicitly established to represent them, and for elections to be fought not as massive national referendums, but at levels much closer to people's own experience.