Neelanjan Sircar is an assistant professor at Ashoka University and a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. In a recen...
Neelanjan Sircar is an assistant professor at Ashoka University and a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. In a recent paper, titled “The Politics of Vishwas: Political Mobilization in the 2019 National Election”, he argues that instead of the economic accountability model that has been in use in India to explain voter choices – which says that people reward politicians for development – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in 2019 represents “a politics of vishwas”, meaning trust, and operates in a very different way.
Scroll.in spoke to Sircar about how he established this argument, how Modi is “regionalising” national politics and how the Emergency came in the way of political science research in India.
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Summarise for me the concept behind the paper. What is the politics of vishwas?
The larger question is twofold.
One is obviously that we’re in a period in which the BJP as a whole looks electorally dominant at the national level. But also, I think we want to grapple with whatever changes are happening in society –...
