Violence and Democracy by Kazuya Nakamizo

Author:Kazuya Nakamizo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trans Pacific Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

6The 1989 Lok Sabha Election as a Watershed

The impacts of the riots

The 1989 general election was a rare event in India’s post-Independence political history in that the election campaign and the major religious riots in Bhagalpur progressed concurrently. Of the 17 Lok Sabha elections from 1951 to 2019, this was the only occasion in which such large-scale riots coincided with an election campaign. Moreover, Congress lost its single party majority in the 1989 Lok Sabha election, spelling the end of its status as the central player in India’s party system. The results of this watershed election (see Table 1.1) that led to the political change are summarised as follows.

Congress won only 197 seats (39.5 percent of the votes), losing more than one half of the seats it had won in the previous 1984 election (218 seats and 8.6 points in the vote share). On the other hand, the Janata Dal, founded only one year earlier, made huge gains by winning 143 seats (17.8 percent) while the National Front secured 145 seats, including two seats won by the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh. The BJP also greatly increased its seats from two (7.4 percent) in 1984 to 85 (11.4 percent). Among left-wing parties, the CPI and the CPM gained more ground than in 1984 by securing 12 seats (2.6 percent) and 33 seats (6.6 percent) respectively.

In relation to the religious riots, the election produced the following results in the eight states in which riots occurred in the period in 1989 from January to the Lok Sabha election (Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) (see Table 6.1).1

Congress’s loss in these eight states amounted to 169 seats, which means that the party lost 77.5 percent of its total loss of seats in these states that had been rocked by communal violence. If we focus on the seven states (except Andhra Pradesh) that saw a total of 336 fatalities between January and September 1989, Congress lost 202 seats, which accounted for 92.7 percent of the total loss. Meanwhile, the Janata Dal increased its base by 108 seats in the eight states, which accounted for 83 percent of its newly acquired seats. The number of increased seats in these states amounted to 92.8 percent for the BJP and 35.3 percent for the two Communist parties. It is clear that the reduction in the number of Congress’s seats and the increase in those of major non-Congress political parties can to a considerable extent be explained by the election outcomes in these eight states.

The important fact is that six of the eight states were ruled by Congress at the time: Andhra Pradesh was under the Telugu Desam Party and Karnataka was under direct President’s Rule. As Karnataka was put under President’s Rule from April 1989, it is reasonable to say that the state government was virtually under Congress’s rule, since Congress controlled the central government. While the leaders of the opposition parties repeatedly stressed during the election campaign that religious

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