The Ecology of Peasant Communism in India

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the agrarian base of Indian communism through the use of statistical data and techniques in which the Communist vote over three general elections since 1957 is correlated with 35 largely socio-economic variables taken from Indian census data. The results indicate that two of these variables—landlessness in densely populated areas—explain a significant percentage of the variance in the Indian Communist vote. It is further suggested on the basis of statistical data accumulated by other investigators for Java and the Philippines that the same two variables are highly correlated with Communist strength in other parts of Asia.