Raphael Susewind

One of the conceived wisdoms of my discipline holds hat it's usually women who bear the fallout of groupism.1 Women are told to uphold "traditional values", women have to be protected from honor attacks on men, in short: women are the signifier of community. I was thus surprised when I discovered last week that the rise of groupism in India seems to have an impact on male Muslim names - but not on female ones. Many of the most prominent male names among Muslims have a religious connotation, whereas female names tend not to. We also saw that female names are much more diverse, with less clear trends. Take today's picture as an example, an election hoarding in Lucknow's recent municipal polls: the woman candidate is a Saniya - no religious meaning - but her husband (included here, of course, since he runs the show even if his ward became a woman's reserved seat this time around) is a Mohammad.

• 1. A term coined by Rogers Brubaker, which I still adore...

If you were to meet the stereotypical Muslim couple in Lucknow, she would be called Noor, he Mohammad (but prefer to abbreviate his name to Mohd or Md) and their last name would be Ali - these are the three most prominent Muslim names found on Lucknow's electoral rolls right now. The runner-ups are Nasreen, Naseem, Sima and Parveen on the female side, Abdul, Ahmad, Ali and Saif on the male side and Ahmad, Bano, Khatun and Khan as far as lastnames go.1 What is interesting is to see how the frequency of these names change over time - and how gender plays a role in this. Let's have a look at male firstnames first (click on the image for a larger version):

• 1. I should clarify that single names - if found on the electoral rolls - count as lastnames here...

There was a time in the 1990s when political commentators joked about Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav and his attempts to woo Muslim voters by calling him a "Maulana", an Islamic scholar. With the recent assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the talk of "Muslim vote banks" returned with vehemence - and many political observers attributed the clear SP victory to a "return" of Muslims to the party. In their surveys, political scientists did, however, not find any evidence for such a return (see here and here).

In today's blog - based on a draft paper I presented last week at Aligarh Muslim University - I argue that this contradiction might be resolved through closer attention to the local level. Based on my work with electoral roll data (see here, here and there), I unpack the "Muslim vote" hypothesis at the example of urban Lucknow. There, Muslims indeed voted more for SP - but not more than they always did (which might be different at different times, in other parts of Uttar Pradesh, or even in rural parts of Lucknow). This localized perspective nicely complements, but also complicates, existing assesments of the "Muslim vote". Since I am currently broadening the analysis to the whole of Uttar Pradesh, today's post is thus also an appetizer for a larger argument in the making.

Since I cleaned up my data anyway, I thought I might also take a deeper look at an earlier suspicion about Lucknow's urban sprawl. So I mapped the boundaries of the same according to three different datasets - the official ward boundaries notified in the late 1990s (based on census data from 1991), the builtup area as seen from NASA's MODIS satellite in 2002 (which I used in all my maps so far), and now the area in which polling stations had more than one booth in the 2012 assembly elections (which tend to be urban, while rural Lucknow has one booth per station, and one station per village). Here is the outcome (larger version):

Always, always, always look closely at raw data before doing any statistics! This was the most important lesson my statistics teacher tried to impress upon me back in undergraduate training. Funny things can go wrong when handling large datasets, so switch on your common sense and compare input with output - or so he said. He has just been proven right once more. I spent two weeks to pay for my negligence, and the following three blog posts had to be corrected:

Mapping Lucknow: party strongholds
Mapping Lucknow: Muslim life
Residential segregation

What happened? Two weeks ago, I decided to wrap up my work with the electoral rolls which kept me occupied for the last so many weeks. While copying all files in a common folder to clean up the mess on my pendrive, I saw an odd irregularity in polling station names. I looked closer. And it all blew up.

In order to create the maps and statistics mentioned above, I had to integrate datasets from four different years: election results from 2007, 2009 and 2012, polling station localities from 2009, and electoral rolls revised in 2011. I knew that 2007 would be tricky, since constituency boundaries were redrawn in the 2008 delimitation exercise. I did not expect 2009, 2011 and 2012 to be a problem though. Consequently, I just integrated these datasets based on the unique polling booth ID assigned by the Election Commission. Silly me.