Citizens and parties

THE THIRD QUARTER OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN INDIA, IF VIEWED from a certain distance of time, would appear as a period during which certain processes were set in motion that transformed the age-old structure and character of the society. One such process, already evident, is the politicization of Indian masses. Its immediate mani-7 festation lies, among other things, in the rapid expansion of the political sector in the society, but its full implications for the long established structures of power and influence will be unfolded in the years to come.It is to the analyses of these substantive processes that the con tributions to this volume are devoted. They utilize a wide range of data obtained from two large-scale surveys of the 1967 and 1969 elec tions carried out by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and also some aggregate data on the 1971 elections.
In the final analysis, the test of Indian democracy lies not in ad hoc changes at the apex of the system, but in the substantive forces operat ing at the ground level of the polity. The first part of the volume exa mines these forces at the level of the citizen the nature and extent of his involvement and participation in electoral and day-to-day politics, his sense of political efficacy, the nature of his political alie nation, and his allegience to democratic norms. Together, these contri butions present the emerging civic and political profiles of the Indian electorate and examine their implications for the larger system.

The second part examines the demographic and social bases of the competitive structure of the Indian party system. Focusing on vot ing preferences and party identifications of citizens across elections. the contributions in this part inquire into the phenomenon of party affiliation and assess its implications for the electoral process and the representative system.

This volume forms a part of the Centre's long-term programme of empirical research in the field of Indian politics. While the Centre's earlier work in this area was based on analyses of aggregate electoral data and field studies of villages, towns, and constituencies, this volume for the first time brings together studies based on large-scale surveys of political attitudes and behaviour of Indian citizens.

The studies reported here were made possible by the financial assistance of the Indian Council of Social Science Research : a grant for analysis of data from the 1967 study, a project grant for the 1969 study, and a further grant for secondary analysis of the data from the latter study. I take this opportunity, on behalf of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and its research staff, to express our gra titude to the Council for his support. The authors are also grateful to N.K. Nijhawan and Shankar Bose for their help in the analysis of the data, to M.P. Sinha and C.R.M. Rao for editing the manus cript at various stages, to Ava Khullar for her help in preparing the manuscript for the press, and to T.K. Kurian, M.K. Riyal, and Bhuwan Chandra for typing the several drafts of the manuscript with their usual care and competence.