Electoral Politics and Hindu Nationalism in India by Dasgupta Koushiki;

Author:Dasgupta, Koushiki;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2019-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

3  Bharatiya Jana Sangh (1957–67)

Politics of trial and error

The fundamental contradiction of Jana Sangh politics in the late 1950s and 1960s is that the party was looking vulnerable to establish some commutation with the regional and local electorate. As political developments outspread through the 1960s, regions, groups and especially the states started playing an important role in moulding the patterns of national politics. The party system in general is now supposed to be moving from social consolidation to disintegration, and the Congress found itself facing a thoroughly diverse approach of political competition. This particular configuration provided the framework within which the changes in the Jana Sangh took place. The structural changes in the party were mediated by strategic arrangements which documented new social divisions available for political mobilization. In this period, the Jana Sangh reflected a shift from the ‘national’ to the ‘local’, from centre to the periphery. The party adapted itself to these developments as best it could and became engaged in a series of experiments to achieve some fortune in electoral and parliamentary politics. This chapter gives an overview of the state-wide electoral record of the party mobilizing upper-caste Hindu support and managing factional disputes; it also presents a critique of the Hindutva politics on account of its somewhat imperfect appeal among the masses and its problems in raising the real issues of socio-economic concern. With a special emphasis on the states situated outside the Hindi language belt of Northern India, this chapter attempts to locate the electoral destiny of the Jana Sangh during each national and state legislative elections. In a nutshell, this chapter explores the principle political trends of the party after the election of 1957, when the political chemistry between the Communists, Swatantra Party and the Jana Sangha came out as one of the most striking affairs of non-Congress politics of India.

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