Right Turn in Indian Polity: Modi on BJP’s Chariot by Yogesh Atal and Sunil K. Choudhary

Actors, events and processes that determine the characteristics of the political scene in contemporary India may rightly be understood via a number of tropes—all equally useful and deficient at the same time. This is especially true in case of the ongoing churning in Indian democracy. If for the decade of the 1990s the tropes were Mandal, Market and Mandir, the tropes to understand contemporary politics in India have acquired the shape of ‘Governance’ and ‘Development’. In the last three decades or so, in the context of ever evolving tropes, serious attempts have been made to unravel the changing terms of debates and discourses in Indian politics through academic rigour and insights. What was missing in these works, and which this work attempts to provide, was the rigorous and ‘objective’ election study that can link the previous decades of Indian polity since Independence to the final ‘moment of arrival’ in the form of the ‘right turn’.