ABSTRACT
The Tenth General Election in India will always be associated in people's mind with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. This chapter focuses on some aspects of the social processes that appear to have influenced the outcome of this election. As originally planned, the Tenth General Election was scheduled to have been conducted in three phases: 205 Lok Sabha constituencies went to the polls on Monday, May 20th. One of the most important of the questions is what the mobilization patterns of the major political parties competing in the Tenth General election revealed about the relative importance of class, caste, ethnoreligious and regional cultural identities in the contemporary Indian political environment. Both the Janata Dal and the Samajwadi Janata Party propounded the shared doctrine of empowerment of the Backward Castes, preservation of the secular state, and opposition to the creation of a Hinduized ethnoreligious state.
