A Historical Analysis of All India Elections
A new chapter in Indian electoral politics began with the first Lok Sabha elections in 1952 and till 2019, 17 national and 376 Rajya Sabha elections have been held. Apart from that, 280,000 gram panchayats, 6,672 intermediate level block or mandal panchayats, 500 zilla parishads and thousands of municipal/city corporation elections are held every five years. The number of elected representatives of three-level rural and one-level municipal councils is about 3 million, of which 130,000 are women.
In 2019, journalist Dr. Prannoy Roy and Dr. Dorab Supariwala published a book titled “The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections”. This book provides an analysis of the electoral history of 17 national and 376 state level elections in India. The electoral history of 67 years from 1952 to 2019 is divided into three electoral periods. The three periods are characterized separately.
The first period is 25 years from 1952 to 1977 – the ‘incumbent period’ (pro-incumbency period), the second ‘anti-incumbency’ period is 1977-2002 (anti-incumbency period) and the last period is 2002-2019, possibly up to 2024. can be extensive. This third period is called ‘Samabhagi’ period (the fifty-fifty period).
The first period was the rule of freedom struggle party (Congress) and freedom struggle leaders. This period ended with Indira becoming Nehru and Shastri. The second period is the rise of a kind of ‘angry’ voter. Strong anger against the ruling party has an impact at the ballot box. The third period is the period of ‘stability’ and particularly of record-based voting behavior. People voted by seeing the work record in this period.
