We stand on the brink of nuclear war, thanks to the bellicose attitudes of the BJP, which was returned to power after the 1999 elections with 23.75% of Indian voters supporting it. 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. Under the BJP government in Gujarat, we have witnessed the worst massacres since Partition. In the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, voter support for the BJP in their stellar state averaged no more than 52.48%, and again since only 47.03% of the electorate voted, only 25% of Gujaratis have supported the BJP, and 75% did not.
Nor did L.K. Advani improve on his party’s average, with only 40.42% of the electorate of Gandhinagar bothering to vote, and no more than 61.14% of them plumping for him. Interestingly, 35% of the voters opted to support T.N. Seshan, former Chief Election Commissioner and a totally untried political figure, signaling a strong anti-vote against the BJP supremo. The blood-drenched BJP of Gujarat can claim no larger support base. Out of the 59.30% of electors who went to the polls, only 44.81% voted for them.
The country has been ravaged from within, and gravely threatened from without, as the result of the ill-advised policies of the rightwing 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 BJP is aware that its national voter base is shrinking, and in fact shrank dangerously by 10% just between 1998 and 1999, while the Congress continued to enjoy a 25% larger base of support. The recent State Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh showed a 30% downwards slide in BJP voter support since 1996!
The long unquestioned rule of the Congress from Independence till 1977 cultured our politicians into believing that leadership demanded nothing more than cynical patronage larded over with liberal corruption. But the democratic people of India gave notice in 1977 that they had a will of their own when they threw out Indira Gandhi, despite the Congress spin doctors giving her the status of a risen Durga, and an Empress by descent. Within three years they again threw out a gaggle of selfish old men who misread the people’s mood into believing it was their chance to benefit through the old practice of patronage and corruption. The people gave Rajiv Gandhi a larger mandate than they gave his grandfather, monitored his juvenile performance closely, and had him out in five years. Since then they 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 we 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. Power had to be gradually stripped from the British aristocracy, but neither the common folk of England nor the ethnic Irish, Welsh, and Scots would be permitted to benefit from the process. Thanks to conquered empires, it was all managed with skillful power by two competing look alike elite groups. The emergence of the Labour Party caused a brief flurry of anxiety in the inter-war years, but today we see that Blair’s Labour Party, unlike Ramsay Macdonald’s working class party of the 1930s, conforms very much to the mould of a British elite party.
In the wake of de-colonization, leaders of Britain’s ex-colonies gratefully adopted the FPTP system just as the Congress did, and for the same obvious reasons. But the great majority of democratic European countries, which had emerged out of autocratic rule and tyranny through two devastating world wars, sought various forms of Proportional Representation as offering truer parliamentary representation to different political groupings, and regional interests, reflecting the full range of political opinion. 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 after a Royal Commission on electoral reform deliberated the matter for two years, and two national referendums secured the people’s consent for change. The purpose was to ensure that an ‘electoral system should allow Governments ... to meet their responsibilities. Governments should have the ability to act decisively when that is appropriate, and there should be reasonable continuity and stability both within and between Governments.’ With the 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 ‘reservations’ within the FPTP systems feeds into the corrupt practice of patronage, and denies minorities and women a place by natural right. If our low literacy standards are pleaded as a reason for sticking to the FPTP system, then we must 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.
Our highly skilled Election Commission and bureaucracy can easily manage any of the PR variations we 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. We may all remember the cavalier fashion in which Medak was adopted as ‘Madam’s’ constituency, while in distant Delhi members of Indira Gandhi’s team kept calling her constituency ‘Mendak,’ for some time!
The only reason we stick to the undemocratic FPTP form of elections is that our 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 the gains of corrupt money. It is never too late to study 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. 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 99.96 lakh votes! The people signaled that they were searching for a viable ‘third choice,’ for a coalition of different interests and political persuasions. The FPTP system cannot any more produce strong single party leadership for our sophisticated and differentiated polity.
The larger parties must forget about vote banks and make principled policy-based alliances with smaller groupings to form, a government. Several ills of the Indian political system would be eliminated at one stroke, if we adopted the PR electoral system: poor representation of minorities and dalits; falling representation of women; poor voter turnout; a large number of wasted and spoiled votes; and our specialty – entrenched political fiefdoms. The criminalization of politics, and 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. PR systems allow any number of variations, and we can invent our own. But of one thing we may be sure; if we had had PR, the Gujral government may never have fallen, and we might be far safer than we are today. The BSP would have four times as many seats in the Lok Sabha as of now, nor would they have needed the patronage of the Thakurs and Brahmins of Uttar Pradesh to come to power.
The fear of ‘Mandalization’ brought out into the open the anxieties of the Indian elites, and later their sophisticated rejection of the ‘politics of identity.’ But it is common knowledge that every political party, 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 make their own choices, which are taken in camera by powerbrokers,and the unhappy fallout explained by political dalals as the result of machinations, of foreign powers, of the WTO, of non-patriotic elements, of ‘confused’ people. Coalition politics can only be stabilized through a PR electoral system. We must rid ourselves of another unwanted colonial legacy, if the mischief of Partition is not to be enlarged till it blows South Asia apart. And we must face democratically the prospect of seeing 50 Muslims and 150 Dalits permanently in the Lok Sabha, 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. Who knows, instead of begging for reservations, the women of this country could sweep the polls under their own banner, and bring us all back to sanity, kindliness, and prosperity!
