Ideology and Identity

Abstract

This book challenges the view that party politics and elections in India are far removed from ideas. It claims that a dominant intellectual paradigm of what constitutes an ideology is not entirely applicable to many multiethnic countries in the twentieth century. In these more diverse states, the most important ideological debates center on statism —the extent to which the state should dominate society, regulate social norms, and redistribute private property, and on recognition —whether and how the state should accommodate the needs of various marginalized groups and protect minority rights from assertive majoritarian tendencies. Using survey data from the Indian National Election Studies (NES) and survey experiments from smaller but more focused studies, and evidence drawn from the Constituent Assembly debates, it shows that Indian electoral politics, as represented by political parties, their members, and their voters, is in fact marked by deep ideological cleavages, with parties, party members, and voters taking distinct positions on statism and recognition. This ideological divide can account for the replacement of the one-party-dominant system by a party system in which regional parties have become far more important and a right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had spectacular success in the 2014 national elections. The focus on ideology also explains why leadership is so important in contemporary Indian politics as well as the limited influence of patronage politics. The book shows how education, the media, and religious practice transmit the competing ideas that lie at the heart of the ideological debates in India.

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