Book Review : The Verdict - Decoding India's Elections

I went into reading The Verdict - Decoding India’s Elections with 0 expectations, anticipation, excitement, and a thirst of knowledge alongwith a concomitant increase in my understanding of my India, and its electoral realities. After reading it, I can honestly state that the anticipation, the excitement was worth it; the thirst of knowledge as well as my understanding or at least appreciation of the Indian Electoral realities and the trendlines has been increased by a significant extent. And yes, it does help us decode the elections!

THE BOOK

This is a book on, primarily, Elections in  India, Predictors, The art of Analysing, Opinion Polls / Pre-Election Polls / Exit Polls more than anything else. It goes deep into the polls, the method that should be adopted, the method/s that is / are in practice, and the analysis of the same. It gives a detailed explanation alongwith a comprehensive statewise analysis in the process. That said, to be completely honest, the book also delves deep into the state of political choice in India in a very balanced, non-confrontational style. It is divided more or less equally in two parts – one aspect, the 2^nd and 3^rd parts of the book, deals with forecasting; and the other 2 parts deal with the ground reality of Elections in India

FORECASTING

Fully 2 parts of the book are devoted to polling, and forecasting election results, with a fascinatingly precise detailed analysis of the same. Given the media hyperbole with polls and even a poll of polls, this is not misplaced; in fact, we do need a detailed understanding and appreciation of the polling and forecasting process, the proper statistical methods and the declaration protocols to be followed. This can help us identify the good from the not-so-good polls. And given the hype around these, this is vital; my only regret is that this book will remain  an elite book to be read by a precious few. This is not the stuff that can go viral, which is a great pity.

The other distinct benefit to be had from this is this process of explaining the minutiae of forecasting and polling reveals to us the many indicators that act as predictors; this adds a real value to the book take-away, helping us get a deeper appreciation of the ground reality and trends. As this isn’t a summary I wont go into what those predictors are, : but be prepared for a surprise. State elections and their impact, by-elections, voting percentage  - all are present, as well as more than a few genuine surprises that take you unawares. In addition, some old suspicions, or rather guesstimations of predicors you may have had get confirmed.

OTHER PERTINENT ELECTORAL ASPECTS

The first and the fourth part of the book is not about forecasting; the first part is a trend analysis from the 1952 elections onwards, alongwith a deep look at the changes that have happened. It looks at trends of pro vs anti-incumbency,  grass-roots democracy, trends in importance of Lok Sabha vs Assembly elections {be genuinely prepared to be stunned}, EVMs, the role of independent candidates, as well as  the role of women. This last I will cover separately; it deserves a separate look. The book looks at First-Past-The-Post as well as Proportional Representation – this is the only negative I can find. I would have liked some more details on Proportional Representation.

The book also tried to look at why people don’t vote, as well as the relations between voter turnout and electoral results. A lot more needs to be done to understand why people don’t vote,, but it is crucial {in my opinion} that Rural turnout is higher than Urban Turnout. That says a lot; but a lot more  needs to be done to understand this. I got the feeling that the book could have been fleshed out a lot more, and some serious intellectual thinking could have been incorporated, some thought-experiments with random field tests to ascertain some hypotheses regarding voter behavior. This, and the point above, cost the book one star in my rating. I rate it at 4 stars.

The next two points I would like to highlight are Minorities, and Women. First, Minorities. In a rather disturbing {to me} few pages, some highlights of minorities are  touched upon, making you think and think hard. Read the book for this alone. The book pulls out data [the more observant among us would have noted this already} – but data is data. The data of Minority representation it pulls out is enough to cause you to take a pause and think hard.  And it does this is a balanced, non-confrontational, data-based, non-partisan unbiased approach.

Now, Women, voting, politics and elections. If you are a woman – trust me, you need to, repeat, need to read this book. Note the emphasis: the italicization and the underline. The data points it contains need to be read by all of us, especially Indian women. The lower level of historical woman participation in both candidates as well as voters, as well as the heartening recent voting trends find a mention; as does the rather disturbing spectre of the missing women {unlisted voters}. The faster rising trend in female voting, the lower Hindi Belt woman turnout, and the impact of voting by women on the election result are among the biggest takeaways from this book.

CONCLUSION

This is a book on Indian Elections, and a much needed one. It is in virgin territory, there isn’t much popularly available literature in a friendly format. This is where the book scores the highest – its presentation is very easy, and comprehensible. This, and the area, scope and breadth of the book – Minorities, Women, State-groupwise analysis,  detailed facts, historical trends and data, voter turnout and participation etc make it a must read book for Indians. At times one does feel the need for more detail, but I guess the authors had to try and appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and hence kept it simple and uncomplicated. 4 stars for me, but it can also be 5 stars if you are not interested in the two small points where I wanted more.