In the Lokniti-CSDS survey conducted during the election campaign, some questions were asked to measure the voters’ reaction to the new reservation policy announced by the BJP government. Only one-third of respondents had heard about the new policy.
The people who had heard about the policy were asked some questions to get their opinion on the said policy. When it came to separate reservations for Vokkaligas and Lingayats and increasing the quota for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, more than two-thirds of the respondents either fully supported or somewhat supported the move. Opinion was more or less evenly divided on the issue of ending the quota for Muslims (Table 2).
Among those who took a stand on the reservation policy, those who supported it were more likely to support the BJP, while those who were against it were more likely to favor the Congress. It is important to say that this is in no way an indicator of voting patterns. Of those who had heard about the reservation policy, nearly half (one-third of the respondents) supported the BJP. There are other articles in this collection that refer to class and education divides in voting. The BJP’s vote share was higher among the more educated and more affluent. These were the sections who would have heard more about the new reservation policy.
Veena Devi is a professor at the Department of Political Science, Jnana Bharathi Campus, Bangalore University and Nagesh KL teaches at the Department of Pre-University Education, Karnataka