CA Election: Who voted for who

CA Election: Who voted for who
TKP, 14-Mar-2010
Sudhindra Sharma and Bal Krishna Khadka

A small news item on March 11 which did not make it to the headlines or TV discussions mentioned that a former assistant minister and Nepali Congress central committee member Hari Shanker Pariyar had joined the Maoists with some of his Dalit followers. With the Maoists threatening to launch a people’s revolt come end of May, and the other parties in the coalition government considering this merely a bluff, it would be pertinent to explore the support base of the Maoists. Who are the supporters and sympathisers of the Maoists? What are their demographic characteristics in terms of age, educational qualifications and caste/ethnicity? Does Pariyar’s quitting the Nepali Congress and joining the Maoists have any significance?

Three months after the completion of the Constituent Assembly election in April 2008, Interdisciplinary Analysts (IDA) had undertaken a nationwide survey in July-August 2008 with its statistically stratified random sample spread across 30 districts asking which party the respondents had voted for. A few months after the collapse of the Maoist-headed coalition government in May 2009, IDA had conducted another nationwide survey in July where an equal number of people across the country had been asked what they thought of the row over the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and who they thought was right — the then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda or President Ram Baran Yadav. From the responses to these two questions, it is possible to ascertain the demographic characteristics of the supporters and sympathisers of the Maoists, at least in very broad terms, and to glean valuable insights.

In the survey carried out in 2008, the following question was asked: "Which political party did you vote for under the proportional system?" As is well known, surveys such as those done by IDA allow for disaggregating the data by variables such as age, sex, urban-rural settlement, development region, ecological region and caste/ethnicity. Disaggregating this question by a respondent’s caste and ethnicity reveals that a person’s choice of a political party is related with his/her caste and ethnicity. This is shown in the Table 1.

Among the eight broad caste/ethnic groups, support for the Maoists is the strongest among the hill Dalits followed by Tarai and hill ethnic communities. While two out of three hill Dalits reported voting for the Maoists in the CA elections, so did almost every other ethnic voter (both among the hill and Tarai ethnic communities). The data also reveals that the Maoists have a fairly good presence among the hill castes. The support base of the Maoists is the weakest among the Madhesi groups — among Madhesi castes, Muslims and Madhesi Dalits.

After the row over the COAS and the collapse of the Maoist-led coalition government, IDA in its nationwide public opinion survey had asked the following question: “On May 3, 2009, the government under the premiership of Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda sacked General Rookmangud Katawal from the post of Chief of Army Staff. Late in the evening the same day, President Ram Baran Yadav wrote to the army headquarters informing General Rookmangud Katawal to stay in the post of Chief of Army Staff and continue his job. What is your opinion in this regard — who do you think was right, Prime Minister Prachanda or President Ram Baran Yadav?”

A high proportion was ambivalent with regards to the row over the COAS: 50 percent said “don’t know/cannot say” on this issue. Among the people who did express their opinion, 25 percent thought that Prime Minister Prachanda’s action was right while 20 percent thought that President Ram Baran Yadav’s action was right. What is revealing is the response to this question by educational attainment levels of the respondents.

When disaggregating the public’s opinion on the COAS row, one notices that a high proportion of the illiterate said “don’t know/cannot say”. With a rise in the educational attainment, people begin to form a definite opinion on the matter. If, for instance, 76 percent of the illiterate said "don’t know/cannot say", this comes down to 13 percent for those who have passed Bachelor’s level. Likewise, once educational attainment increases, those who say that the prime minister was right also increases. It, however, reaches the zenith among those who have passed School Leaving Certificate. With a further increase in the level of education after SLC, those who think the prime minister was right begins to decline. Among those who have passed the Bachelor’s level, only 24 percent think the prime minister was right compared to 41 percent among those who have passed SLC.

The data reveals a clear correlation between the level of educational attainment and the thinking that the president was right with regard to the row over the COAS. Unlike support for the prime minister, it does not taper off after reaching its zenith at a particular point. However, among those who have passed the Intermediate and Bachelor’s level, there is a substantial number of ambivalent opinions that consider neither of them to be right. The fact that support for the then Prime Minister Prachanda in the COAS row is highest among those who have passed SLC need not be construed as being highest among young people in general. Those who have passed SLC could be young people; it could also be older people who were not able to continue their education after SLC.

Combining the findings of the two surveys allows one to form some ideas of the support base of the Maoists. It, however, also leads to the following question: What could be the common feature behind hill Dalits (and hill and Tarai ethnic communities to a lesser extent) and those that have modest educational attainment levels? Though these are quite different entities — one a caste category and the other an educational level — hill Dalits and those who could not continue their education after SLC are those sections of society that feel that they have somehow been disadvantaged by the existing system. Feelings of having been deprived of the things in life that others have, and thus being “stuck” to where they are, could be the feature that ties together and links these disparate entities.

In a much-discussed op-ed piece in Kantipur on March 3, 2010, Pradeep Poudel, chief of the student wing of the Nepali Congress, lamented that Dalits were no longer attracted to the Congress, the political party which had been at the vanguard of the equality movement for half a century. What the news report mentioned above of Hari Shanker Pariyar’s joining the Maoists only said was that he was all praise for the Maoists for uplifting the Dalits. It did not give any clue as to what may have been his real reasons. With two out of three hill Dalits having voted for the Maoists during the CA elections as revealed by the IDA survey, one can only imagine the pressure exerted on Pariyar from the rank and file to join the Maoists!

Sudhindra Sharma, a sociologist, is executive director of IDA and Bal Krishna Khadka is a statistician at IDA.