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IV

1. The term Chattisgarh in Hindi means 36 forts. The region in the middle ages was said to have been ruled from 36 fortified places of which the present Raipur was one. Presently the districts of Bastar, Raipur, Durg, and Bilaspur comprise the region of Chattisgarh.

2. The known history of Raipur city can be traced back to the 10th century A.D.

3. According to the Delimitation of Parliamentary and Assembly Constituencies Order issued in 1966, 26 out of a total of 65

assembly constituencies in the region of Chattisgarh were reserved scheduled castes (9) and scheduled tribes (16) candidates

(Election Commission India 1967a:152-156).

4. For details of areas included in the present state of Madhya Pradesh see Census of India 1961 Madhya Pradesh General

Population Tables Vol. Ill, Part II-A. Delhi: The Manager of Publications.

5. The information for this section was obtained from the Handbook on the General Elections in Madhya Pradesh: Election Results from 1952 to 1967 issued by the Chief Electoral Officer, Madhya Pradesh (1967:40,41).

6. In 1964 the Communist Party of India (CPI) broke into two almost equal divisions. The rightist faction, officially recognized by the Election Commission as the CPI has since then been loyal to the Soviet Union, unequivocally committed to parliamentary democracy, and actively cooperated with Indira Gandhi's Congress Party. It is popularly known as the pro-Moscow group. The

leftist faction, officially recognized by the Election Commission as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is alleged to be pro- Peking and has openly declared its faith in extra-parliamentary methods of gaining power. But the New China News Agency has

disowned the CPIM and subjected its leadership to sharp ideo­ logical attacks. In this study unless I refer to CPI or CPIM, the term ’Communist' refers to both these parties. For further divisions among the Communists of India see Marcus Franda,

India's Third Communist Party. Asian Survey 9, 1969. Also see Harry Gleman, The Communist Party of India: Sino-Soviet Battle­ ground. In A, Doak Barnett, (ed) Communist Strategies in South­ east Asia. New York: Frederick A, Prager 1963.

7. Sudhir Mukherji in the meanwhile organized the pro-Communist trade union in Bhilai and stood on the CPI ticket in Bhilai in 1967. Now he is more popular in Bhilai than in Raipur.

8. The Justice Party of Madras was a south Indian parochial party. It drew its support primarily from non-Brahmin landed gentry and was aimed against Brahmin supremacy. See Eugene Irshik, Political and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement, Tamil Separatism 1916-1929. Berkeley and Los Angeles* University of California Press 1969.

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9. Here I am referring to Rajni Kothari, Gopal Krishna, Dirubhai Sheth, Rameshray Roy, Bashiruddin Ahmed, and Ashish Nandy who are working at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. For details of the model advanced by these scholars see particu­ larly the articles of Kothari and Rameshray Roy (Kothari and Sheth 1965; Kothari and Shah 1965; Kothari 1967b, 1970c; Rameshray Roy 1966a, 1968).

10. Until now three national election surveys have been carried out all around 1967 in India. Two of these surveys were carried out by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in cooperation with S.J. Eldersveld, University of Michigan, and D. Marvick of the University of California. For several articles based on these surveys see the annual numbers for 1970 and 1971 of Economic and Political Weekly and the November issue of Asian Survey 1970. Another study -- a three-wave survey with the sample drawn from west, north, and east India -- was sponsored by the Research

Programmes Committee of the Planning Commission in 1967. The all-India report of this study prepared by N. Srinivasan and V. Subramaniam was submitted to the Planning Commission in 1969 and is not yet published.

11. In a regression model based on survey data in India in 1967, the dummy variables based on type of native place, age, literacy, income, and caste accounted for less than 5 per cent variation in Congress voting. See Douglas Madsen, Solid Congress Support in 1967: A Statistical Inquiry. Asian Survey X, 1970.

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V

MOBILITY AND PARTY SUPPORT MOBILITY AND VOTING

In the fourth chapter we sought to explain differences in the voting of people in similar socio-economic categories as between Bhilai and Raipur. In this chapter we turn our attention to the influence of

fathers' political loyalty, social, geographical and occupational mobility on the changing patterns of party support in India and especially in our study areas.

Loss of Congress Voting Support

We have already seen that from 1952 to 1967 the Congress steadily lost voting support. In 1967 it also lost its majority in several state assemblies when challenged by strong non-Congress alliances, although its net loss of votes exceeded 5 per cent only in a few north Indian states. The main challenging groups, the Communists, the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party, and the regional parties such as the Dravida Munnetra Kajhagam, retained their own voting support in the states where they were respectively the strongest, and were able to mobilize it in the interests of the electoral alliances they formed.

This change was the subject of both impressionistic and aggregate statisitcal analyses around the time of the 1967 election. The explan­ ations offered mentioned many factors such as caste, religion, feudal influences, high prices, and language tensions.^ However, none of these studies attempted quantitative estimates of the proportions of the varia­ tion in Congress votes that could be attributed to these factors, either individually or as a whole. Moreover, they neglected altogether the influence of social mobility on the shifts in party support.

Social Mobility in Western Society

European and American studies of social mobility suggest that its primary significance for political behaviour lies in the consciousness of status discrepancy. Every society comprises a number of separate

hierarchies (social, economic, educational, occupational, ethnic and so on) each of which has its own status structure and its own conditions for the

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attainment of a position of prestige. There may be discrepancies between the different positions a person occupies in the different hierarchies at a given time. Mobility up or down within only one or some of these hier­ archies widens the status discrepancy between them and the others (Lipset and Bendix 1964:64,65), The perception of the discrepancies leads to attempts to redress the balance, especially by trying to improve one's status in those hierarchies where it is relatively low. This may be

tried directly or through political affiliations that promise such improve­ ments, or by seeking alternative status satisfactions in some new hierarchy such as that of a political party.

A number of factors have been found to influence the political orientation of upwardly mobile persons, in comparison with those in a static situation. According to comparisons of political preferences as between the United States on the one hand, and northern European countries on the other, two of the most important are the openness of the occupational structure and the need to adjust to the life-style of the class into which one moves or among whom one lives. Taking occupational mobility as the independent variable, a number of studies indicate that where this is relatively easy, and adjustment to the life-style of the higher class is correspondingly easy, the upwardly mobile trend to become more conservative than they were -- indeed more conservative then most established members of the class into which they move. On the other hand, compared with their counterparts in the United States, Britain and Australia, those who have moved up into skilled manual occupations in northern Europe have had a greater struggle both to move and to be received into their new milieu, and this is thought to explain the fact that they become politically more

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