Political Participation in Border Parliamentary Constituencies of Punjab

Abstract

The present paper attempts to study political participation of people living at the cutting edge. The border between India and Pakistan is among the most hostile borders in the world, as both countries have fought many wars and have faced war like situations since 1947. The focus of ruling parties both at Centre and State, is the defence, and people living there remain neglected on all counts. The present study attempts to explore the political behaviour, attitude and orientations of the border people towards their state and national level politics. For this study, the post-poll survey data of 2014 general elections (Punjab) has been taken from the Centre for Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi which is an autonomous research institution. Four border parliamentary constituencies of Punjab namely Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Khadoor Sahib and Ferozepur have been selected. This paper is divided into two parts: part I gives the information of the socio-economic profile of the respondents; part II analyses the political participation and political awareness level of border people. At the end, the study shows that SAD-BJP alliance has a dominating trend in the electoral politics of border area.