Introduction: Contextualizing and Interpreting the 15th Lok Sabha Elections

Most of the papers presented in this special issue of SAMAJ are the outcome of a workshop organised by the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi in July 2009. By then the results of the 2009 general elections had been largely commented upon already. The workshop was therefore not meant to discuss electoral results per se, but rather to have specialists discuss papers that considered elections as an analyzer of political dynamics that most authors usually studied in more ordinary times. As ...