Elucidate the prominent trends in voting behaviour in contemporary India, and discuss how astroturfing affects the scenario.

Prominent trends.

• Participatory inversion. Unlike most democracies, turnout in India is higher among the poor, rural, Dalit and Adivasi voters than among the urban affluent — Yogendra Yadav's second democratic upsurge. Women's turnout has risen to equal or exceed men's.
• The decline of the single dominant party and its partial return. The Congress system gave way to fragmentation and coalitions from 1989, and to a re-nationalised contest after 2014, with split-ticket voting between national and State elections now routine.
• Caste as a coalition, not a bloc. Caste still structures voting, but as an assembled coalition of communities rather than automatic bloc transfer; Jaffrelot's silent revolution and Rajni Kothari's earlier account of the politicisation of caste both apply.
• Anti-incumbency giving way to performance and welfare voting. Delivery of tangible benefits — the labharthi or beneficiary vote — now competes with identity as a predictor.
• Leader-centred and increasingly presidentialised national voting, with the prime ministerial choice weighing heavily.

Astroturfing is manufactured grassroots sentiment: paid or automated activity engineered to look like spontaneous public opinion. Its effect works through four channels.

• Manufacturing consensus. Coordinated volume creates a false impression of majority opinion, and voters, using social proof as a shortcut, adjust towards the apparent majority — a bandwagon effect built on fabricated evidence.
• Agenda setting. Trending topics are treated by news media as news, so the fabricated agenda enters mainstream coverage.
• Micro-targeted division. Encrypted messaging platforms allow different, mutually invisible appeals to different groups, weakening the shared factual basis of a common electorate.
• Erosion of trust. Once voters suspect all mobilisation is manufactured, genuine movements are discounted too.

Assessment. Astroturfing does not create preferences so much as amplify, sharpen and misrepresent them, and its influence is greatest among low-information and newly enfranchised digital users. The remedies — disclosure of political advertising and its funders, platform transparency about coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and enforceable rules during the campaign period — are institutional, not technological.