That the politics-revalidating voter has replaced the politics-dismissing non-voter as the star in the national debate is obviously a good thing. What is less obvious is how the voter made his decision in this round of assembly elections. We have called him wise. But can we deconstruct that? Maybe something useful can be learnt if we look at some economic data from just one state, Madhya Pradesh.

Why economic data? And why MP?

Non-economic factors, while obviously and always important, can’t be automatically assumed to be the determining factor. Economics gets far less detailed attention than it deserves in Indian political analysis. If the voter is wise he will never ignore the economic context.

Madhya Pradesh is a good pick for two reasons. As in Delhi and Chhattisgarh, the incumbent won. And the verdict was strongly bipolar in terms of votes cast, not just seats won. The BJP and the Congress accounted for almost 75 per cent of votes. The BSP was more marginal in MP than in other states. If the two major parties attract most votes cast in constituencies, state-wise economic data has better analytical relevance. This is because state-wise party vote share is then a good analytical approximation of the verdict, which is of course determined by constituency-wise first past the post rule.

But MP beats Delhi and Chhattisgarh in being economically typical. The state is big and relatively poor. Agriculture dominates economic activity in MP slightly more than it does at the level of national averages. NSSO data classifying households by economic activity shows that in MP, of every 1,000 households, 479 report farming as chief activity, 94 are in non-farm category and 322 in farm labour category. The national averages for these categories are 384, 170 and 236, respectively.

... contd.