The savage massacre of hapless Muslims in Gujarat, plainly abetted by the BJP, the Hindu right-wing party in power, must have come as a rude shock to many of the older Britishers, who had watched Attenborough's Gandhi with some nostalgia. It must be even more depressing for those who recollect that Lord Macauley had predicted 150 years ago that when the British Empire ended, it would leave behind an empire of British laws and letters. Then, there are televised shots of the Indian Prime Minister telling the troops to prepare for a decisive battle, Jack Straw's pessimistic comment that Asian leaders did not seem to understand the real dangers of the situation they had created, and droves of ex-pats heading for home.
So, have the Indians democratically decided to turn fascist? Hardly. After several decades of supporting the Indian National Congress, with nothing to show for it except growing political corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, and Kafkaesque routes to patronage, the people of India have decided over the last decade to give no party a clear mandate. Indian politicians have little experience with coalitions. Many imagine that if they clobber together cabals of self-interest, the public might still be induced to give them support on a flood of rhetoric, blatant insincerity, and visions of glory, past and future. It is with such expectations that the BJP has come to lead a highly unstable coalition after the 1999 elections.
An examination of voter patterns shows how thin is the BJP claim to represent Indians. In the 1999 elections, only 23.75% of Indian voters supported the party. And since only 59.99% of the electorate voted, we can say that only 15% of the Indian electorate voted in the BJP, and 85% did not. Voter support for the BJP in Gujarat, the only major state where they are in power, averaged no more than 52.48%, and again since only 47.03% of the electorate voted, only one out of every four Gujaratis can be said to support the BJP.
Nor did L.K. Advani, the powerful right-wing leader who led a huge mob in 1992 to destroy the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, improve on his party's average, with only 40.42% of the electorate of Gandhinagar, Gujarat's capital, bothering to vote, and no more than 61.14% of them plumping for him. Interestingly, 35% of the voters opted to support his opponent, T.N. Seshan, a former Chief Election Commissioner and a totally untried political figure, signaling a strong anti-vote against the BJP supremo.
The events in Gujarat have strained relations between Hindu and Muslim communities as never before since Partition of the country in 1947, and India has been close to nuclear war. All as the result of the policies of the BJP, which, aware of the thin margins that keep it in temporary power, has reacted with greater adventurism to polarize communities, create a sense of crisis, and consolidate voter support by making its 'political vision' the inevitable reading of present-day history. The party is aware that its national voter base is shrinking, and in fact shrank dangerously by 10% just between 1998 and 1999. The 2002 State Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest State, showed a 30% downwards slide in BJP voter support since 1996!
Voter frustration with both the Congress and the BJP led to 169 parties, and 4648 candidates including 1945 Independents, standing for election in 1999; the BJP and the Congress jointly receiving only 52.05% of the total votes polled. The Independents polled a total of 9.99 million votes! The people signaled that they were searching for a viable 'third choice,' for a coalition of different interests and political persuasions.
The long unquestioned rule of the Congress from Independence till 1977 had cultured Indian politicians into believing that leadership demands nothing more than cynical patronage larded over with liberal corruption. They received a major shock in 1977, when the voters threw out Indira Gandhi, sickened at the excesses of the State of Emergency she had called in 1975. The Congress Party sycophants had given her the status of an Empress by descent, if not of a risen Goddess, all to no avail. Within three years voters again threw out the old men who had replaced her, and who misread the people's mood into believing it was their chance to quarrel over the perks of office. The people gave Rajiv Gandhi a larger mandate than they gave Jawaharlal Nehru, his grandfather, but monitored his juvenile performance closely, and had him out in five years. Since then the Indian people have sought for coalitions committed to building the nation, but have been frustrated in imposing their political will, basically because of the First Past The Post election system they respectfully inherited from Westminster, like a whole lot of bureaucratic baggage, best suited for a colonial power.
When the Constitution and the electoral system was gravely discussed at the dawn of Independence, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would choose the British FPTP system, for the all powerful Congress Party not only required simplicity of operation, but nothing more than a loyal opposition. It was neither an inevitable choice, nor the best one. The system grew out of the political struggles of the landed Tories and the bourgeois Whigs, fuelled by the agrarian and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. It might have been best suited for British political development, but certainly not for a newly independent country, with several hundreds of distinct communities, speaking many languages, and belonging to different faiths.
In the wake of de-colonization, leaders of Britain's ex-colonies gratefully adopted the FPTP system just as the Congress did in India, and for the same obvious reasons that it tilted the scales in favour of the ruling elite. But the great majority of democratic European countries have chosen various forms of Proportional Representation as offering truer parliamentary representation to different political groupings, and regional interests. In fact, apart from India loyal to British traditions, the only other major power that follows the British system is the USA, with its two great political parties twinned around a political centre like Britain.
Even the white part of the Commonwealth has started to edge away from a system that was peculiar to British history. Australia has adopted an Alternative Vote system, while New Zealand, always considered more British than the Brits, switched to a full PR system in 1993. The change was made only after a Royal Commission on electoral reform deliberated the matter for two years, and two national referendums secured the people's consent for change. Under New Zealand's PR system, in a 120 member house, 15 Maoris and one Asian entered parliament, and women's representation went up from 21% to 29%. The Indian system of 'reserving' 79 constituencies for Dalit, and 41 for Tribal, candidates, within the FPTP system, has done little so far to lessen the discrimination faced by these communities. Nor will the mooted 33% reservations for women do much to secure gender justice. If anything, reservations have helped to extend the corrupt practice of patronage. If low literacy rates are pleaded as a reason for sticking to the FPTP system, then Indians must seriously try and improve education, and also examine how Sri Lanka has successfully adopted the Preferential Voting system for Presidents since 1982 to better reflect its ethnic diversity. India's highly skilled Election Commission and bureaucracy can easily manage any of the PR variations it may wish to adopt, so simplicity of operation can no longer be adduced as a reason. One good reason for adopting the FPTP system was that it made the parliamentarian responsible to the constituency, but ties of geographical loyalty rarely impacted on political policies in England, and almost never in India.
The only real reason India sticks to the First Past The Post form of elections is that its political leaders hope to gain far more than they deserve through a race they can gamble on, as the name suggests, and which blankets out local voices, and community interests, and reduces politics and nation building to crass patronage, skillfully lampooned by Bollywood, and quick gains of corrupt money. If they really wish to make India the largest democracy, the Indian parliament should debate other democratic practices, whether that of Ireland - where by the way the British were happy that PR safeguarded Protestant interests - or of Germany with its complex mixed systems.
It is time the larger Indian parties realized that the FPTP system cannot any longer produce strong single party leadership for the country's sophisticated and differentiated polity. Several ills of the Indian political system would be eliminated at one stroke, if the PR electoral system were adopted: poor representation of Muslims, and Dalits; falling representation of women; a large number of wasted and spoiled votes; and the Indian specialty - entrenched political fiefdoms. The criminalization of politics, and the latest Indian phenomenon of the politicization of criminals could not take place without the cover offered by large effete parties. The wastage of votes would be avoided through mechanisms like the Single Transferable Vote, which passes it on to the next preferred candidate. A fragmented polity can be prevented by maintaining either an appropriate Threshold level of votes for parties to be represented, or by the interesting system of 'Apparentement,' followed in South American countries, which permits very small parties to keep their identities but pool their votes together to achieve seats in parliament. The PR system allows any number of variations, and more can be invented.
It is common knowledge that every political party in India, including the BJP, carefully balances caste and communal factors in its choice of candidates, in the colour of the rhetoric it employs in different regions, and ultimately in the policies it considers judicious to pursue. But the people are never trusted to take their own decisions, which are taken in camera by powerbrokers,and the unhappy fallout explained later as the result of the machinations of the other parties, of foreign powers, of the WTO, of non-patriotic elements, of 'confused' people.
Coalition politics can only be stabilized through a PR electoral system. Indians must rid themselves of another unwanted colonial legacy, if the mischief of Partition is not to be enlarged till it blows South Asia apart. And they must face democratically the prospect of seeing 50 Muslims and 150 Dalits permanently in parliament, at least till such time that disadvantaged communities are secure in the knowledge that discriminatory practices have ended, and they may rightly see themselves as Indians.
