The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare A Long View of India's 2014 Election

This volume explores how the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) won the 2014 Parliamentary elections with such an unprecedented majority, and what that victory means for politics in general and Indian politics in particular. It opens up space for new theoretical and methodological reflections on electoral democracy, critically taking on such salient issues as development, terrorism, charisma, media, new mechanisms of mobilization, nationalism, rumour, religion, regionalism, polarisation, space, Muslim vote, and caste. This volume is distinct in its ability to focus squarely on the empirical acts of voting. It sociologically and historically examines the enduring as well as changing institutional, social, political, and cultural landscapes in which voting takes place. Unlike most other studies on elections in India, this book puts human subjectivity at the centre of election studies. The anthropological-sociological perspective the volume places before readers draws on political-social theory whereby the volume also examine the larger and changing contours of modernity, democracy and elections being its key faces. As such the volume situates the 2014 elections in relation to changing nature and forms of elections and democracy globally, in particular in conversation with those in the democratic nation-states in the West.

Irfan Ahmad is Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany. His most recent publication is Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017 and Oxford University Press, 2018). Before working as Associate Professor of Political Anthropology at ACU, Melbourne, he taught politics and anthropology at Monash University, (2009- 2013). He was the founding founding co-editor of Journal of Religious and Political Practice (2015- 2017). He has held visiting positions, inter alia, at Brown University, the USA; Kanungo, Pralay is Professor of Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; ICCR Chair of Contemporary India Studies at Leiden University and Fellow at International Institute for Asian Studies, The Netherlands. He is Honorary Professor at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne and Guest Professor at Sichuan University, Chengdu, China. He was a Visiting Professor at Maison des Sciences De L'Homme, Paris. Kanungo is the author of RSS's Tryst with Politics: From Hedgewar to Sudarshan (2002) and co-editor of The Politics of Ethnicity in India, Nepal and China (Primus, 2014). He was also the Principal Indian Investigator of Indian-European Social Sciences Research Networking Project focused on election studies.