Indian Elections 2009

Revisiting Indian Electoral System M C Raj

Congress Party has come to power in India in the just concluded elections to the Parliament. Some eminent people have chosen to describe this as the victory of Indian democracy comparing the quality of democracy in India to the democratic practices in the neighbouring countries in Asia. Democracy has to bear fruit to the people on whose behalf it is being practiced and not in comparison to what it does for the neighbours. Congress has come to power with 28.6% of votes. This is only a marginal increase of over 2% from the 2004 elections. A few other regional parties have managed to increase their share of votes but have decreasing returns in terms of seat share. It is reported in the Times of India of 04 June that Bhola Singh (BJP) has won the Nawada Parliamentary seat in Bihar with less than 10% votes. The Constituency has a total of 14 lakhs with an estimated population of about 24 lakhs. He won the seat by gaining only 1.3 lakh votes. 145 out of 573 elected members in the latest elections have won with less than 20% votes. Murli Manohar Joshi, Lalji Tandon and Hukumdeo Narayan won with only one eigth of the votes. Salman Kursheed and Farooq Abdullah also got similar number of votes. Meira Kumar got only one seventh of votes. Only five MPs, Nagaland, Sikkim, two Tripura and one from West Bengal (Tamluk) got more than 50% of votes. The average MP this time got only one fourth of the vote share. This is the anomaly of Indian democracy that its practice is incongruent with its profession. Indian democracy is self styled as one of the best int he world but Nepal has tarred this image by taking recourse to a proportionale representation system in their democratic praxis. In the Indian electoral system people are making their choices. There is no doubt about it. But they are forced to make a choice within certain dominantly designed boundaries of which they are ignorant. That somebody with less than 10% of votes can get into the Parliament is a democratic anomaly in its character of representation. That a party that manages to scrape through with 28.6% of vote share is hailed as the harbinger of political hope of a nation is a democratic anomaly in its representational character. If actual representation is removed from the praxis of democracy it is bound to be farce. Unfortunately the trajectory of modern democracy has this farcical dimension inbuilt into its from the time of its evolution from an enlightenment-cum-colonial period in history. Fortunately some of these countries caught up in the churning out of a dominanat variant of democracy and representation have realized the flaw in the trajectory and have shifted their electoral system to the Proporitonate one. 21 out of 28 Western Eruropean Nations have reformed their electoral system to usher in proportionate representation in their Parliaments. Some of these countries have done model setting in termas of enhancing representation of

citizens in the Instruments and Mechanisms of democracy in their respective countries. New Zealand has made provisions for separate electorate for the ndigenous Maori people within their PR system. Norway has officially recognized the Parliament of the Sami indigenous people as a mark of democratic recognition of the right of the indigenous people to have their own internal governance. Germany has provided reservation to the Danish people in one of its northern states. India has been witnessing sproadic clamour for electoral reforms. Such clamour has been restricted to cleaning up the existing system and has not been extended to critically examining the legitimacy of the same in the praxis of a mature democracy. There is one section of Intelligentsia in India that is not even aware of the nuances of other electoral systems that are in vogue in many democracies. There is another section of intelligentsia that is aware of the existence of other forms of electoral systems but know intuitively that it is going to provide space for many marginalized communities of people in India. This is something that the chemistry in their bodies naturally resist and therefre, such intellectuals have shunned any public debate on the First Past The Post or the Majoritarian Electoral System. Another set of intellectuals have clamoured for the American type of two party democracy in India. The USA, UK and India are major democracies that still cling on to the Majoritarian Electoral System though dialectics are in advanced stage in the former two countries for ushering in a Proportionate Electoral System. Arun Shouried belongs to this school of thought though he stretches his argument a bit further and argues for the power of governance to be handed over to the executive. The underlying argumentation is that representatives of common people should not be vested with the power to govern the country. According to Atul Thakur and Shankar Raghuram the argument in favour of two party system does not hold water as West Bengal and Kerala with multy party have gained the maximum average percentage. West Bengal has 41% and Kerala has 36%. The other state that has got one third of votes for average MPs is Tamilnadu with also multy party. In contrast States where the fight was straight between Congress and BJP such as Gujarat, MP, Chhattisgarh, Uttarkhand and Rajasthan the average is 25% and below. Only in Delhi and Himachal with bipolar contest the situation is better. India’s FPTP electoral system has reservation for the Dalits and Adivasis/Tribals. But within the Majoritarian system reservation has only become a handy tool in the hands of the dominant parties to politically neutralize Dalit/Adivasi leadership. In the FPTP system seats in the Parliament are not proportionate to the percentage of votes that a party gains thus leaving out a vast majority of voters unrepresented in governance. Some of the States in the North Eastern part of India are woefully underrepresented. There are many Tribal groups in many of these States and except Assam all other States have only one or two seats in the Parliament. If

multi member electoral districts are introduced as in the PR system these States will have the possibility of sending more than six to eight representatives to the Parliament from each State. In this case the strength of the Parliament will have to be increased within manageable levels. Germany with about 40 million people has more than six hundred members of Parliament. Nepal has introduced PR system in their praxis of democracy with the support of the Maoists. Big effort is going on there to integrate it into the new Constitution of Nepal. In subsequent elections, before the PR system was introduced in Nepal only one Dalit candidate was able to enter the Parliament. With the introduction of PR system it was possible for the Dalit community in Nepal to send 49 Dalit candidates into their Parliament in the last general elections. Proportionate Electoral System does not go by any uniformity though there are many common threads in all its variants. Not only the system but also the counting of votes and apportioning representation to every voter is a major mechanism in the countries that practice PR system. Democracy is about providing space for all citizens in the Instruments and Mechanisms of governance. The present electoral system in India constricts the political space of the poor and culturally marginalized communities of India by making it possible for a party to come to power with even less than 27% of total votes cast. If such communities make coalitions among themselves through their respective parties taking on board also some religious minority communities and fight elections as coalition partners within the ambience of the PR system it is going to spell the rise of the hitherto excluded and downtrodden people and mark the ushering in of a mature democracy. The Rural Education for Development Society and the Booshakthi Kendra in India have made a research on the Proportionate Electoral System as it is in German democracy and have published “Dalitocracy” as a result of their research. This was done after due reflection on the demand for separate electorate and the need for other viable alternatives. Subsequently they have also launched a Campaign for Electoral Reforms in India (CERI) to bring about a Proportionate Electoral System. CERI is making further researches on the Norwegian model of Parliament and the New Zealand electoral system. India is also badly in need of adapting an electoral system that will checkmate efforts to infuse Indian democracy with fascism. CERI is spearheaded by a group of senior leaders of civil society drawn from different parts of India. Proportionate Electoral System is not a panacea for all the woes of a struggling democracy. However, many nations of the world have proved beyond doubt that it provides a just and legitimate space in governance for citizens. It is in this context that the demand of Mr. Sitaram Yechury on the first day of the present Parliament gains credence and weight. He has asserted that only a party or a coalition that gains more than 50% of votes in elections should come to govern the nation. Though this demand is woefully inadequate it has already laid the foundation for a possible constitutional amendment to bring

about a Proportionate Electoral System in India.