Electoral politics in the Indian states: three disadvantaged sectors

India is a country of the disadvantaged. To speak, therefore, of "disdvantaged sectors" within such a society is to single out those who live below some arbitrary and ill-defined threshold. But while public officials and scholars may debate which social groups are disadvantaged, how many people this entails, and why they are disadvantaged, there is little disagreement that there are very large numbers of people in India who are substantially behind the rest of the country. The studies in this volume consider how three of these "disadvantaged sectors" affect and are affected by the electoral process.

There are a number of ways by which the disadvantaged can be identi fied. In a country as large and diverse as India, region is a particularly useful starting point. From state to state and within states there are substantial differences in levels of modernization whether one considers literacy, per capita income, rates of mortality and morbidity, urbanization, agricultural productivity or industrial development. These differences are politically salient, for they affect the demands which the less developed states make upon the central government as well as the demands which less developed districts make upon their state governments. Regional economic differences in India are partly linked to the impact of British rule, for the interior portions of the country remain industrially less developed than the coastal urban centres developed by the British; they are partly linked to the discoveries of raw materials, especially coal and iron ore; they are partly linked to the pattern of post-independence investment by government; and they are partly linked to the construction of canals and irrigation works and to natural geographic circumstances that have made it possible to achieve higher levels of agricultural productivity in areas of assured water than in dry regions. It is also important to note the lower level of development in those areas that formed part of princely India before independence, including all or portions of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Andhra.