Edvancer analyses Indian political parties manifestos – India Elections 2014

In keeping with the election spirit in India and the heated debate around the manifestos of the three main parties fighting the 2014 general elections, BJP, Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), we decided to analyse their manifestos in terms of word frequencies to figure out where the focus of these three parties lies. Our analysis is presented in the form of a word cloud for each of the manifestos as seen below. The word cloud contains the top 100 words by frequency.  We have removed the common English words and also other commonly used words like India, government, national, country, nation and name of the party.

Fig 1:  BJP manifesto word frequency analysis

Fig 2: Congress manifesto word frequency analysis

Fig 3: AAP manifesto word frequency analysis

Some of the points which are immediately apparent are:

1. All three parties have a focus on development but BJP seems to have made the word ‘development’ the corner-stone of its manifesto given its very high frequency vs. the frequency of the other words.
2. ‘Education’ comes out as another high priority area for all three parties but over here the Aam Aadmi Party seems to have focused quite extensively on education within its manifesto surprisingly over ‘corruption’.
3. For the BJP, apart from development the attention is on ‘technology’, ‘people’, ‘security’ and ‘resources’. The promotion of technology across all areas seems to be a core area of the manifesto for them.
4. The BJP also provides an accent on all kinds of security from national to water to energy & food and utilization of natural and human resources.
5. Apart from education, the AAP manifesto seems to focus a lot on its pet projects of ‘Gram Sabha’ and ‘Swaraj’. Surprisingly there is also a heavy focus on ‘security’ especially internal security borne out also by the high frequency of the word ‘police’. Interestingly the word ‘political’ is repeated quite often especially in the context of differentiating itself from other political parties in general and the alleged problems that they have created in India.
6. For the Congress there seems to be a lot of focus on the Scheduled Castes and Tribes given the no. of times the word ‘Scheduled’ appears in their manifesto in keeping with their stated policy of focusing on the backward class of society. The BJP has some focus on the backward castes in its manifesto but there is barely a mention in AAP’s manifesto.
7. Apart from backward castes, there is also a lot of focus on ‘women’ in the Congress’ manifesto along with ‘economic growth’ and ‘health’.
8. Interestingly the word ‘continue’ appears quite frequently in the Congress manifesto suggesting that the focus in their manifesto is to also speak about their existing work and schemes of the past 10 years and to continue the same. This is also borne out by the repetition of the words ‘bill’, ‘act’ and ‘right’.
9. For those looking to debate a communal/secular flavour in the manifestos, the word ‘Hindu’ is mentioned only once in both BJP and AAP manifestos in general areas and there is no mention in the Congress manifesto. The word ‘Minority’ however gets 18 mentions in the Congress manifesto and less than 5 in the BJP and AAP manifesto. The word ‘Muslim’ gets no mention in the Congress manifesto, just 1 in the BJP’s and 14 mentions in the AAP manifesto.

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