Recent parliamentary elections in India: a closer look  Premium

. Sabyasachi Das’ paper raises questions about ‘irregularity’ in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in India. It claims that the ‘electoral manipulation’ thesis is more consistent with the ‘pattern of irregularity’, citing data from the ECI website, CSDS post-poll survey and ‘standard sources’. It argues that Muslim voters were subjected to ‘strategic deletion and strategic discrimination’. Counter-arguments include the possibility of BJP targeting non-Muslim homes, and the lack of ‘credible proof’ of Muslims constituting a ‘single homogenous’ voting community. The paper itself concedes that ‘proving electoral manipulation’ is a ‘harder task’ and that the tests/evidence/datasets ‘are not proof of fraud’. It also cites surveys which rate India higher than other democracies in terms of the confidence of the electorates.

Das, Sabyasachi, Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy (July 3, 2023). Available at SSRN: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4512936

A working paper titled ‘Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy’, authored by Sabyasachi Das, an academic teaching economics in Ashoka University, has received much traction on social media and in academic circles. The paper merits close scrutiny as it raises worries about the ‘future of democracy’ in India by claiming to detect ‘irregular patterns’ in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Based on election studies literature that draws from democracies around the world, mainly the U.S., the paper argues that the ‘irregularity patterns’ visible in the 2019 elections can be attributed either to ‘electoral manipulation’ or to ‘precise control’ theses.

The ‘precise control’ thesis refers to the incumbent party’s ability to precisely predict and then affect the win margins with the help of ‘its superior electoral machinery’ in closely contested constituencies. For this purpose, the party targets polling stations, especially the ones in urban areas with a large number of voters, as they are easier to access. This may result in a large turnout in these polling stations, resulting in high vote shares for the incumbent party. On the other hand, the ‘electoral manipulation’ thesis refers to targeted electoral discrimination at the local level, partly facilitated by the weak monitoring of election observers. This include the strategic/targeted suppression of certain community/group votes in the form of registration and/or turnout manipulation. This amounts to electoral fraud and raises serious question about electoral integrity.

Coming to India, the paper traces ‘irregularity’ in the 2019 elections in the form of ‘excess/disproportionate wins’ of the incumbent party (the BJP) in ‘constituencies that were closely contested between a candidate from the incumbent party and a rival’. Using data from the website of the Election Commission of India (ECI), the paper mentions 59 parliamentary constituencies (PCs) where the absolute win margin for the winning party was within 0.05%, out of which the BJP won 41. The party won 22 out of 27 PCs in the States where it was the incumbent party. In these PCs, which had significant Muslim electorates, the discrepancy was visible in the high turnout at the polling stations, making a case for ‘irregularity’. The paper looks at the datasets collected from ECI websites, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) post-poll survey and from ‘standard sources’ like published papers, and states that this ‘pattern of irregularity’ can be explained by the ‘electoral manipulation thesis’.

In support of the contention that the data is ‘less supportive’ of the ‘precise control thesis’, the paper presents two arguments. The first argument is based on the CSDS post-poll data, which shows that the BJP and other contestant parties did not ‘campaign significantly harder’ in the closely contested PCs where the BJP managed to ‘barely’ win. Even then, these PCs, particularly the polling stations with a significant number of Muslim votes, registered high turnouts. The second argument is that the BJP did not campaign ‘harder’ in the polling stations having sizable Muslim voters, as the party did not ‘expect to get significant support from them’. As per the CSDS poll data of the 2014 and 2019 elections, only ‘8 percent of Muslims reported to have voted for the BJP’.

As for the ‘pattern of irregularity’ being more consistent with the ‘election manipulation thesis’, the paper refers to the ‘discrepancy’ that occurred between the ‘final count of EVM votes’ for each Lok Sabha constituency for the first four of the seven phases of election as released by the ECI on its website, which did not match with the ‘constituency wise number of votes in EVM’ that was released later. The ECI ‘removed the earlier figures from its website’ after the ‘media query’. The paper claims to trace ‘discontinuous change with respect to the incumbent’s win margin’ in the later official figure and that ‘the discontinuity’ was ‘concentrated in BJP ruled States’. Also, the EVM data discrepancy was ‘significantly larger’ in ‘closely contested PCs barely won by BJP’. The paper claims to find ‘the evidence on turnout discrepancy as indicative of manipulation done locally at the polling stations, rather than resulting from aggregation fraud at the constituency level’.