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Description
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This database is a unique achievement to which we are happy to give you a free access. It covers the members of the lower house of the Indian parliament (the House of the People or Lok Sabha) who have been elected between the first general elections of 1951-52 and the fourteenth ones in 2004 in the Hindi-speaking states (Bihar, Chandigarh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand). Many of these states did not exist in 1951-52. We have done as if they did by pooling together the constituencies which were to form them in order to make inter-temporal comparisons possible. For each Lok Sabha MP, this database provides their surname, first name, constituency, state of birth, party, gender, date of birth, religion, caste, level of education, and occupation. These data draw from the Election Commission publications, the website Who's Who in Lok Sabha [the only website I found today is the Parliament of India, Lok Sabha, https://loksabha.nic.in/]. and individual interviews with the MPs themselves or party old timers. Such a database can only result from a collective endeavour. It was initiated by Christophe Jaffrelot who collected most of the data year after year from the mid-1990s onwards. Elisabeth Theunissen, Cyril Robin, Virginie Dutoya, and Zuheir Desai played a major role successively over the last fifteen years. These data have been analysed in two books dealing with the growing presence of the low caste groups on the Indian political scene: Christophe Jaffrelot, India's silent revolution - The rise of the lower castes in North Indian politics (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003), and Christophe Jaffrelot, "Introduction", in Christophe Jaffrelot and Sanjay Kumar (eds), Rise of the plebeians ? The changing face of Indian legislative assemblies, New Delhi, Routledge, 2009.
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