¹ See de Tocqueville, A., Democracy in America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002 [1835]Google Scholar.

² In 2007 when the volume Anthropology of Democracy was published, there were only a handful of political anthropologists explicitly working on democracy. See Paley, J. (ed.), ‘Toward an Anthropology of Democracy’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 31, 2007, pp. 469–496CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ This is not, however, to advocate a minimalist view of democracy. I appreciate Lisa Wedeen's spirited critique of such a view in Wedeen, L., Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, especially in Chapter 3, pp. 103–147CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ See the recent attempt at classifying democracies according to several criteria in Youngs, R., The Puzzle of Non-Western Democracy, Carnegie, Washington, 2015Google Scholar.

⁵ See Varshney, A., ‘India's Democratic Challenge’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 86, no. 2, March 2007, pp. 93–106Google Scholar.

⁶ In a recent paper Laura Zimmerman indicates that voter turnout increases in areas with a higher quality of implementation of government-led welfare programmes such as NREGA, a rural employment guarantee scheme. Such analyses that link voter turnout with government performance or other factors are, however, rare. See L. Zimmerman, ‘May there be Victory: Government Election Performance and the World's Largest Public-Works Program’, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 9161, 2015.

⁷ For an examination of the ‘free and fair’ nature of Indian elections, see D. Gilmartin, ‘Voting and Party Symbols in India: The Visual and the Law in Constituting the Sovereign People’, Triangle Legal History Seminar, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC, 9 September 2016, pp. 1–3. It should also be noted that India has among the highest numbers of ‘election petitions’ in the world and the conduct of elections is not uniformly efficient everywhere. However, given the scale of the exercise (one million electronic voting machines, 12 million election officials, over 900,000 polling booths) elections in India are considered to be within acceptable levels of procedural efficiency.

⁸ The existing rich literature on Indian elections focuses largely on whom—that is, which party and candidate—people vote for. See Breeding, Mary, ‘The Micro-Politics of Vote Banks in Karnataka’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 14, 2011Google Scholar; Michelutti, L., ‘“We (Yadavs) are a Caste of Politicians”: Caste and Modern Politics in a North Indian Town’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 38, no. 1–2, February 2004, pp. 43–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Michelutti, L., ‘The Vernacularization of Democracy: Political Participation and Popular Politics in North India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 13, no. 3, September 2007, pp. 639–656CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Singh, S., ‘Candidate Caste Effects in Uttar Pradesh Elections’, Studies in Indian Politics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2015, pp. 179–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ruet, J. and Lama-Rewal, S .T., Governing India's Metropolises, Routledge, London, 2009Google Scholar, for comprehensive reviews.

⁹ The field research for the comparative electoral ethnographies project focused on four questions which I framed for the larger project. It was conducted over one month before and during the 2009 general elections in 12 sites. The project researchers submitted reports from their respective field sites and the material from the original reports was integrated with my own fieldwork. See M. Banerjee, Why India Votes? Exploring the Political in South Asia, Routledge, New Delhi and London, 2014. In both the latter and in this article, information taken from the field reports submitted by the researchers is indicated with the following reference: FR: original page number.

¹⁰ This is not to analytically fetishize ‘the electoral moment’, but to take seriously the explanations that voters themselves offered as their reasons for voting.

¹¹ See Maiorano, D., Autumn of the Matriarch: Indira Gandhi's Final Term in Office, Hurst and Co., Oxford University Press, London and New York, 2015, especially pp. 17–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a fuller account.

¹² M. Vaishnav and E. Sridharan, ‘Checkbook Elections?: Political Finance in Comparative Perspective’, 16 July 2015, http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/07/16/checkbook-elections-political-finance-in-comparative-perspective-pub-60754, [accessed 15 March 2019]. See also Vaishnav, M., When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., p. 2.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ I do not wish to suggest, obviously, that the influence of money and muscle is in any way unique to Indian elections: it is unfortunately a feature of many democracies.

¹⁶ D. Kapur and M. Vaishnav, ‘Quid Pro Quo: Builders, Politicians, and Election Finance in India’, Centre for Global Development, Working Paper 276, 12 July 2011, http://www.cgdev.org/publication/quid-pro-quo-builders-politicians-and-election-finance-india-working-paper-276-updated, [accessed 15 March 2019].

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 8.

¹⁸ The average Indian parliamentary constituency is 20 times the size of a UK one; a single Indian MP can represent over two million voters compared to about 70,000 in the UK.

¹⁹ Schaffer, F. C., Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying, Lynne Rienner Publications, Boulder, CO, 2007, p. 186Google Scholar.

²⁰ Björkman, L., ‘“You can't Buy a Vote”: Meanings of Money in a Mumbai Election’, American Ethnologist, vol. 41, no. 4, November 2014, pp. 617–634, p. 617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Björkman, L. and Witsoe, J., ‘Money and Votes: Following Flows through Mumbai and Bihar’, in Kapur, D. and Vaishnav, M. (eds), Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2018, p. 177Google Scholar.

²² Ibid., p. 198.

²³ See, for example, Srinivas, M. N., ‘The Social Structure of a Mysore Village’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 3, no. 42–43, 30 October 1951, pp. 1051–1056Google Scholar.

²⁴ Thachil, T., Elite Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services Win Votes in India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ This is, of course, a classic issue in the study of politics in democracies the world over.

²⁶ Thachil, Elite Parties, Poor Voters, p. 475.

²⁷ See Auyero, J., Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2001Google Scholar.

²⁸ Lazar, S., ‘Personalist Politics, Clientelism and Citizenship: Local Elections in El Alto, Bolivia’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 228–243CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ See Björkman, ‘“You can't Buy a Vote”’.

³⁰ Piliavsky, A. (ed.), Patronage as Politics in South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Ethnographic work has provided excellent analysis of ‘muscle’ or brute force in Indian politics, that is, the social, political, and financial capital that political actors accrue through their criminal pasts. A five-year, multi-sited study ‘An Anthropological Investigation of Muscular Politics’ (AISMA) (ERC 284080) is a collaborative project directed by Lucia Michelutti and others. It examines the modus operandi of systems of muscular political and economic governance in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In a recent article, Piliavsky and Sbriccoli show that people choose muscle men (or goondas) as their leaders, not because of their lack of virtue but because they are able to get things done. They call this ‘the ethics of efficacy’, a key feature of political man. See Piliavsky, A., and Sbriccoli, T., ‘The Ethics of Efficacy in North India's Goonda Raj (Rule of Toughs)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 22, no. 3, 2016, pp. 373–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kanchan Chandra's recent volume which demonstrates how dynastic politics in contemporary democracies emerge out of particular institutional arrangements: Chandra, K. (ed.), Democratic Dynasties: State, Party and Family in Contemporary Indian Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Lazar, ‘Personalist Politics’.

³³ Piliavsky (ed.), Patronage as Politics.

³⁴ S. Wilkinson, ‘Patronage politics in post-independence India’, in Piliavsky (ed.), Patronage as Politics, p. 276.

³⁵ See Banerjee for the ubiquity of the English word ‘vote’ used as part of the lexicon in languages across India: Banerjee, S., ‘Vote’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2017, pp. 410–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ In her forthcoming book Ornit Shani painstakingly charts the story of India's first election, demonstrating how radical it was to introduce universal suffrage in a largely illiterate and poor country and the challenges it posed to both the bureaucratic and popular imagination. See Shani, O., ‘Making India's Democracy. Rewriting the Bureaucratic Colonial Imagination in the Preparation of the First Elections’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 36, no. 1, May 2016, pp. 83–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Anjaria, J. S., ‘Ordinary States: Everyday Corruption and the Politics of Space in Mumbai’, American Ethnologist, vol. 38, no. 1, 2011, pp. 58–72, p. 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)–YUVA 1998, p. 6, in ibid., p. 65.

³⁹ See Tarlo, E., Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See also Bear and Mathur for an account of boatmen on the Hooghly who use ‘receipts’ as a way to legitimize their precarious and informal existence: Bear, L. and Mathur, N., ‘Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy’, Cambridge Anthropology, Special Issue, vol. 33, no. 1, 2015Google Scholar.

⁴¹ De Neve and Carswell FR: 17–18 in Banerjee, Why India Votes?, p. 162.

⁴² Gupta, A., Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012Google Scholar.

⁴³ Mathur, N., Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ See Banerjee, Why India Votes?, Chapter 4, especially pp. 119–122, for a fuller discussion of the electoral machinery of the ECI.

⁴⁵ Shah, A., In The Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2010Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Sundar, N., Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar 1854–2006, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2008Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ See Wouters, J. P., ‘Performing Democracy in Nagaland: Past Polities and Present Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 16, 2014, pp. 59–66Google Scholar; and Wouters, J. P., ‘Feasts of Merit, Election Feasts, or No Feasts? On the Politics of Wining and Dining in Nagaland’, The South Asianist, vol. 3, no. 2, 2015, pp. 5–23Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ The NOTA option is not available in panchayat elections, the most local tier of elections.

⁴⁹ Krishnamurthy FR: 1 in Banerjee, Why India Votes?, p. 2.

⁵⁰ See Auyero, J., ‘The Logic of Clientelism in Argentina: An Ethnographic Account’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 35, no. 3, 2000, pp. 55–81Google Scholar; and Auyero, J., Poor People′s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2001Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Quote from de Tocqueville taken from Epstein, J., Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide, HarperCollins, New York, 2006, p. 58Google Scholar.

⁵² The following account is based on the findings of the dozen researchers from different parts of the country involved in the Why India Votes project who were present on election day in polling booths across the country as well as my own personal experience of observing elections for over 15 years in different parts of India. I recognize, however, that this description may not match the reality equally in all parts of India.

⁵³ It should be noted that violence continues to be used in twenty-first century India to refuse entry rights to lower castes and women to places of worship.

⁵⁴ De Neve and Carswell FR: 48 in Banerjee, Why India Votes, p. 133.

⁵⁵ See Neyazi, T. A., Tanabe, A. and Ishizaka, S. (eds), Democratic Transformation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India, Routledge, London, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Akhil Gupta notes how the routine insistence on paperwork by bureaucracy ‘bestowed a degree of arbitrariness to the biopolitical project…[even though] the product of such arbitrariness was not in any critical way mediated by literacy, by whether the poor person in question knew how to read and write…[and so] literacy is complexly articulated with structural violence…it mediates and structures such violence’: Gupta, Red Tape, pp. 232–233. According to the most recently available census data of 2011, India's literacy rate is 74.04 per cent.

⁵⁷ For an overview of the history of voting worldwide, see Gilmartin, D., ‘Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual’, Religions, vol. 3, no. 2, 2012, pp. 407–423, especially pp. 407–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ An extremely worrying development since the adoption of the EVMs is how it has compromised the secrecy of the ballot. Before, ballot papers used to be shuffled in a barrel before being counted, so booth-wise polling patterns could not be identified. However, EVM votes are counted by machine, thereby revealing accurate data of voting patterns for every polling booth, which covers 1,000–1,200 voters. To correct this, the ECI developed a machine called the ‘Totaliser’ that electronically ‘mixes’ the votes, but this has been opposed by the BJP and other parties, no doubt because this data are very useful in ‘managing’ the supporters and detractors with carrots and sticks respectively. While controversies about whether EVMs can be ‘hacked’ are ongoing, to my mind, it is the absolute necessity of the Totaliser that is the real issue. Without it, the secret ballot, which lies at the heart of the ‘meaning’ of the vote, is severely compromised.

⁵⁹ See Gilmartin, ‘Towards a Global History of Voting’, p. 412.

⁶⁰ See Eck, D., Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998 [1981], p. 5Google Scholar; and Pinney, C., Photos of the Gods: the Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004Google Scholar, on darsan.

⁶¹ Pinney, Photos of the Gods, p. 193.

⁶² De Neve and Carswell FR: 20 in Banerjee, Why India Votes?, p. 159.

⁶³ Jani FR: 9 in ibid., p. 160.

⁶⁴ See Banerjee, Why India Votes?, pp. 98–100, for a longer discussion of a vote as dan.

⁶⁵ Reported by Priyadarshini Singh from the Why India Votes team.

⁶⁶ Yadav, Y., ‘Political Representation’, in Mehta, P. B. and Jayal, N. (eds), Handbook of Indian Politics, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Chatterjee, P., The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Baviskar, A. and Sundar, N., ‘Democracy versus Economic Transformation?’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 46, 2008, pp. 87–89Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ I. Roy, The Politics of the Poor: Agonistic Negotiations with Democracy, forthcoming.

⁷⁰ Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image.

⁷¹ Gilmartin, ‘Towards a Global History of Voting’, p. 411.

⁷² Ibid.