REVIEW 77 behaviour studies can be compatible with the enlarged coverage is unanswered. To elaborate this important guideline, let us see what has been concealed, consciously or otherwise, from election and voting behaviour studies. In a country, 70 percent of whose population is illiterate and an almost equally large percentage remains below the poverty line, mystifying and hoodwinking of the voters would be a common phenomenon. The electorate hears of promises of amelioration of poverty but practice goes the other way. Land reforms, barring in a few states, are yet to materialize substantively, and notwithstanding the tall talk of control of monopoly houses, the assets of top industrial houses are skyrocketing. This raises a number of important issues for political scientists, namely, the character of the state, the relative autonomy of the political system from vested interests and entrenched classess, the institutionalized financial support to various parties in elections, the nature of "popular55 ministries, ideological hegemony and levels of class consciousness, realm of motivations of coercion, extra-electoral activities, impact of socio-economic inequalities on politics of coalition, defection, bargaining and consensus, and the like. But they are blackened as the class approach to the study of election politics and completely rejected. Influence of Lobbies The studies are carried out without any discussion of the lole of the chambers of commerce and big industrial houses, lobbies of rich farmers and landed interests,the trade unions and the development of nationalities, It has to be so as the concerned researchers have axiomatizcd the existing political and social order as rational and just, and presumed that the Indian democracy lias attained a more or less definite form with the prevailing array of interests and parties. Such fallacies naturally become apologia for the status quo and conceal the political reality of domination of ruling classes and the struggle of the toiling masses. The guidelines too ignore these basic issues, for they happen to relate to class analysis, which is repugnant to bourgeois behaviouralism. Although the authors make reference to the sociological imagination of C W Mills more than once, they have not recognized the importance of history in politics which Mills argued vehemently. He said: "No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and their intersections within a society, has completed its intellectual journey." Absence of the historical dimension to politics leads to shallow and mislead-