India at the Polls 1980

India at the Polls, 1980: A study of the Parliamentary Elections, by Myron Weiner, analyses Indira Gandhi’s return to power only three years after the voters’ overwhelming rejection of her emergency regime. The victor in 1977 had been the Janata party, an all-embracing opposition coalition that had come into being to resist the government’s authoritarian measures. Once in office, Janata began to fall apart; power struggles sapped its strength, and it suffered a fatal split. Mrs. Gandhi, meanwhile, made her way back to Parliament and rebuilt her base in the Congress party against the day the government would fall. From his study of the election returns, Weiner concludes that 1980 was a reinstating election: essentially the same coalition of social classes, castes, tribes, and religious groups that had given the Congress party its victories before 1977 returned it in office in 1980. Myron Weiner is Ford Professor of Political Science and a senior staff member of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute. Among his books are India at the Polls: The Parliamentary Elections of 1977, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethic Conflict in India, and, with Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, India’s Preferential Policies: Migrants, the Middle Classes, and the Ethnic Equality.