Introduction
Ideally
the Indian electoral system should be based on proportional representation to
accommodate the vast diversity in the socio-economic characteristics of the
population. In this system political parties are allotted seats in the
legislature and parliament in proportion to the votes that they get and so even
small local parties who can get votes higher than a specified threshold can
find representation in the legislature and parliament. A threshold voting
percentage, as low as 3 per cent of the total valid votes polled is required to
prevent frivolous legislative participation and too much fragmentation. Those
parties getting this threshold vote will also be recompensed in proportion of
the votes gained for the election campaign expenses on the production of proper
bills. There is thus scope for a
thousand schools of thought to contend and bring to fruition a much more
vibrant and diverse democratic culture in India than has obtained so far.
Instead
the first past the post (FPTP) system was adopted in which the candidate
getting the most number of the valid votes cast in a constituency is declared
elected. This latter system was to the advantage of the Indian National
Congress party at the time of independence as it got to rule unhampered on its
own without the pulls and pressures of coalition governance that a system of
proportional representation usually gives rise to and would certainly have in
the diverse Indian context. So the first past the post electoral system of the
British and American democracies, which the British had introduced to suit
their own agenda of keeping the unruly masses at bay, was retained after
independence giving the Congress an undue monopoly of power in the crucial
first decade and a half of governance under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.
History
of FPTP in India
The first
elections to the Lok Sabha held in 1951 saw the Congress winning just forty
five percent of the total valid votes but as much as seventy five percent of
the seats. Similarly in the second elections in 1957 the Congress won forty
eight percent of the total valid votes and seventy five percent of the seats.
In the third general elections of 1962 the Congress won forty five percent of
the total valid votes and got seventy three percent of the seats (ECI, 2005).
The second largest party by way of votes won in all these three elections was
the Socialist Party but due to the fact that their support base was spread much
thinner than the Congress' they could not win seats in proportion to their
votes. In 1951 the Socialists got ten and a half percent of the total valid
votes but only two and a half percent of the seats. This is to be contrasted
with the Communist Party of India, which won only three and a half percent of
the votes and a similar percentage of the seats because their mass base was of
a concentrated nature. Interestingly Ambedkar's political party, The All India
Scheduled Castes Federation, also failed to do well at the hustings in the
first elections in 1951 with the great man himself losing from the Bombay City
North constituency despite having done so much for the Dalits. Similarly in
1957 the Socialists once again got ten and a half percent of the votes but only
three and a half percent of the seats while the Communists got nearly nine
percent of the votes and five and a half percent of the seats. In the 1962
elections the two separate Socialist Parties together got nine and a half
percent of the votes and only three and a half percent of the seats while the
Communists got almost ten percent of the votes and five and a half percent of
the seats.
Thus, a
clever and unnatural choice of electoral system gave the Congress party
thumping majorities to do as it pleased with little effective parliamentary
opposition to its policies. The significance of this disproportion between
votes and seats becomes crystal clear if we compare it with the relation
between the percentage of votes and seats won for the same three groups above
in the general elections of 2004 by which time fractured mandates and coalition
politics had become the order of the day. The Congress, the Nationalist
Congress Party and the Trinamool Congress Party, which have their roots in the
old Congress, together won thirty percent of the votes and twenty nine percent
of the seats. The various splinter groups of the Socialists together won eleven
and a half percent of the votes and sixteen percent of the seats. The
Communists and their allies won eight percent of the votes and eleven percent
of the seats (ECI, op cit). The tables had been turned. The Congress is
continually being spread thin while the smaller parties, concentrated as they
are in localised niches are garnering more seats in proportion to the votes
won. The BJP, which too, harbours similar grandiose political visions as the
Congress in its heydays, now benefits from this FPTP system. While it got only 38
percent of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections it yet secured as much as
66 percent of the seats.
FPTP
and Corrupt Electoral Practices
The adoption
of the first past the post election system is only a short step from letting
the influence of money power and unethical political practice dominate the
electoral strategies of parties. The conservative elements who formed the
majority within the Congress in the pre-independence days had a free hand in
the preparations for the elections to the provincial assemblies in 1936 and
they generally selected candidates from local businessmen, contractors and
landlords who were able to donate funds to the party and also spend lavishly on
their own campaigns. Defections were also engineered from non-Congress parties
in areas where the party was not strong with the dangling of the usual sops
(Das, 2001). This strategy was immensely successful and helped the Congress to
come to power everywhere it contested. Nehru made a few deprecating noises
within the party forums regarding the infiltration of unscrupulous elements but
went along with this wholesale subversion of democratic and ethical norms by
the conservative leadership of the party so as to gain support from them for
his overall leadership.
Nehru in
fact was busy cleverly "burning the candle at both ends" to the
appreciative delight of the Conservatives in the Congress led by Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel after whom the Sardar Sarovar dam is named (Patel, 1936). He
played the mentor to the then young Marxist firebrands led by Jayaprakash
Narayan and gave them much greater importance than the mass following they
commanded. Presiding over the crucial Lucknow Annual Convention of the Congress
party in 1936, held against the backdrop of the British beginning to devolve
power to the Indians and the emerging possibility of independence, he not only
espoused socialism as the solution to India's and the world's problems but also
nominated three members of the Congress Socialist Party which had been formed
earlier with his blessings in 1934 to the Congress Working Committee (Sinha,
1984). In this way he both countered the Conservatives and also co-opted these
firebrands into the leadership and deflected them from pursuing subversive mass
mobilisational work. However, once their purpose of buttressing Nehru's
position vis-a-vis the Conservatives within the Congress was served the
Socialists found themselves rejected in the same way as the Gandhians after
independence. They severed their connections with the Congress and formed the
independent Socialist Party in 1948. Following exemplary democratic principles
they also resigned their seats in the legislative assembly of the United
Provinces and sought re-election. The Congress then used its art of winning by hook
or by crook developed earlier during the 1936 elections to defeat the
Socialists and push them into the political wilderness (Brass & Robinson
eds, 1989).
Given this
corrupt pre-independence history of the Congress right from the first general
elections in 1951, money power, muscle power and the state machinery were used
to vitiate the sanctity of the electoral process in such a way that there was
little chance of an ethical person being able to win elections. Both the
Socialists and the Communists lost out because of this in most areas except in
a few niches where they were in such great mass strength that they could
effectively counter the electoral mal practices of the Congress. Losing out on
state power in a poor post-colonial country like India with an underdeveloped
economy and civil society and an over-developed state apparatus (Bardhan, 1999)
meant losing out on everything as the state was the main collector and
commander of resources and distributor of largesse. Control of state power also
provided the Congress with the opportunity to get massive financial
contributions from the industrialists - the nascent Indian capitalist class in
exchange for policies and programmes favourable to them. This further reduced
the chances of the Socialists or the Communists of winning elections. Even when
the Communists despite mountainous hurdles did manage to cobble together a
government in Kerala, the first democratically elected Communist government in
the world, Nehru threw all political scruples to the wind and dismissed the
government in 1959 to impose Central rule in the state. Defections were
engineered with the dangling of sops to win away elected representatives and
their supporters. Thus there was a continuous exodus of workers and leaders
from among the Socialists and Communists to the Congress (Sinha, op cit).
The net
result was that both the Socialists and Communists got effectively sidelined in
the Nehru era and parliament lost its capacity to act as a check on governance,
which increasingly became of a strong centrist nature shedding even the little
formal federalism that had been provided for in the Constitution. The extent of
the Congress hegemony can be gauged from the fact that the first no-confidence
motion against Nehru's government was moved only in the year 1963, all of
sixteen years after independence. Nehru became the supreme leader as head of
both the government and the Congress party ruthlessly removing those who tried
to stand up to him in opposition by overt and covert means and consciously
promoting weak politicians without much mass following as the chief ministers
in the states (Das, op cit). A
patron-client relationship was set up beginning with Nehru at the top and a
whole sycophantic pyramid going down to the lowest workers at the grassroots
level all trying to dispense state favours. Indira Gandhi, who followed Nehru
as Prime Minister after a brief interlude after his death, pursued these
corrupt practices and perfected them into an art. Finally, the mass movement
led by Jayaprakash Narayan, which reached the verge of forcing a general election,
challenged this covert subversion of democracy by the Congress party. Indira
Gandhi then went to the extent of declaring an internal emergency and overtly
curtailing democratic freedoms in 1975.
Betrayal
of the Sampoorna Kranti Movement Ideals
The long
incarceration in jail during the emergency must have given the opposition
leaders of all hues an opportunity to review the reasons for their electoral
marginalisation and they probably realised that winning elections and being
able to cut and distribute the developmental cake were crucial to effective
operation in the Indian democratic system as it had evolved under the Congress.
So when the parliamentary Socialists and Communists finally made their way to
power at the centre and in the states following the historic elections of 1977
after the internal emergency was lifted they too began treading the corrupt
trail blazed by the Congress. Winning elections and staying in power became the
driving goal and ideology began taking a back seat as Jayaprakash Narayan's
ideas of total revolution too were floated down the Ganges with his funeral
ashes (Sinha, op cit). Nowadays most political parties, and there are many to
accord with the varied diversity of the people across the spectrum from the
left to the right and from the bottom of the social order to the top, that take
part in elections, have recourse to unfair electoral practices prior to winning
and dubious parliamentary practices after that. Indeed the Bahujan Samaj Party
of the dalits, which had given a clarion call for cleansing the dirty politics
of the "Manuvadi" upper castes when it first began participating in
elections, too has gone the corrupt way of the other parties. Most parties have
also duplicated the patron-client relationship on which the Congress is based
and are top down parties centred around single leaders or a small group of
leaders. No wonder then that hardened criminals who have both power and pelf in
the local settings have begun winning elections in embarrassingly large numbers
and dictating what little is left of party policy. Since winning elections and
staying in power have become ends in themselves rather than being the means for
social transformation and people oriented governance, both electoral and
legislative practice have been reduced to being a theatre of the absurd with
bizarre goings on these days. The BJP, backed by the organisational muscle of
the RSS and the backing of the capitalists has now excelled in manipulating the
FPTP to gain an upper hand.
The
Marginalisation of People’s Movements by FPTP
It does
not require much perspicacity to see that given this corrupt milieu it is next
to impossible to win elections at levels higher than that of the panchayats,
and there too with much difficulty, while remaining true to ethical canons and
priniciples of equity and sustainability. This is why the environmentalist mass
movements have been unable to make any electoral headway at the legislative and
parliamentary levels apart from some stray MLAs here or there and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi and to some extent
in Punjab. They have been able to win some seats in panchayats but since these
have little financial or political powers, this does not help in influencing
policy at the state or national level. A vicious circle of marginalisation
results from this. There is a tendency among the masses to vote for those
parties who they feel will be able to win and make an impact on governance.
That is why the marginal "bin pende ka lota" image of the
environmentalists has resulted in electoral formations set up by them falling
flat and becoming even more marginalised. A major problem always is the
mobilisation of resources to do political work in general and election
campaigning in particular.
Therefore,
there is a dire need to launch a campaign for a switch from the FPTP electoral
system to the proportional representation system supported by state funding of
elections which will considerably increase the chances of people’s movements
being able to enter the legislatures and parliament. Even if these movements
have small bases in diverse disjointed locations, cumulatively a federation
like the National Alliance of People’s Movements can garner enough votes across
the country to cross the minimum threshold of votes. Since the members of these
movements and other voters will also know that their votes will not go waste
they will also vote in larger numbers for these movements.
References
Bardhan, P
(1999): The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford University
Press, Delhi.
Brass, P &
Robinson, F eds (1989): The Indian National Congress and Indian Society
1885-1985: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Dominance, South Asia
Books, Delhi.
Das, S (2001): The
Nehru Years in Indian Politics: From a Historical Hindsight, Edinburgh
Papers in South Asian Studies Number 16, Centre for South Asian Studies, School
of Social & Political Studies, University of Edinburgh.
ECI (2005): Performance
of National Parties Vis-a-Vis Others in General Elections, Election
Commission of India website accessed on 12th September 2005 at url
http://www.eci.gov.in/Election Results_fs.htm
Nehru,
J L (1975): Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series Vol VII,
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, Delhi.
----------
(1983): Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series Vol I, Oxford
University Press, Delhi.
Patel,
V (1936): All India Congress Committee Papers, Nehru Memorial Library
and Museum, New Delhi, File-G-85(1).
Sinha, S (1984):
Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement: An Overview, in Reddy, G K C ed Fifty
Years of Socialist Movement in India: Retrospect and Prospect, Samata Era
Publication, New Delhi.
------ (2005): Chunav
Niti, Ranniti Va Anubhav (Election Ethics, Strategy and Experience), (in
Hindi) Samayik Varta, Vol. 28 No. 11
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