While high expenditure does not guarantee victory, low expenditure
almost certainly guarantees defeat! Parties and candidates
are thus trapped in a vicious cycle of high expenditure
and corruption in public office. Politics has become big
business yielding multiple returns on investment, through
transfers, contracts, and tampering with crime investigation.
In most constituencies, political fiefdoms have come to
exist with the help of ill-gotten money, caste clout, political
contacts, criminal links and family tradition. For these
families, investment in politics is a natural and highly
profitable option. Parties are merely labels of convenience,
to be changed at will before elections. Many honest politicians
are finding it increasingly difficult to match the resources
and caste mobilization of these fiefdoms, and are forced
to either retire from contests or resort to corruption for
survival.
In
the first-part-the post system (FPTP) we adopted from Britain,
the candidate who wins most number of votes in a constituency
is elected, and all other votes for the losing parties do
not count. There are no prizes for runner-ups. Therefore,
parties have no choice but to opt for "winnable"
candidates, who invariably dominate the political fiefdoms.
FPTP system thus led to several unhappy consequences. First,
parties are forced to go for those candidates, however undesirable,
who will somehow get elected. Second, candidates are forced
to resort to vote buying and rigging in order to overtake
the rivals. The overall electoral verdict is still fair,
because there is a system of compensatory errors at work,
whereby the malpractices of one party are neutralized by
the rival party. But these distortions necessarily mean
that honest, decent and public-spirited candidates have
no realistic chance of being nominated or elected. That
is why outstanding politicians like Manmohan Singh, Arun
Jaitley or Arun Shourie have to be elected to the Rajya
Sabha!
Third,
FPTP has led to overrepresentation of social groups with
concentrated populations, and underrepresentation of scattered
minorities. The political hegemony of a few caste groups
is thus perpetuated. Muslims never got their due representation,
and therefore ghettoization, vote-bank politics, strategic
voting and communal polarization became the inevitable consequences.
Reservation of constituencies for Dalits too did not help,
because the Dalit candidates have to depend on the local
dominant groups for their political survival.
What
can we do about the unhealthy trends of vote buying, political
oligopolies, criminalization, caste domination, and distorted
representation? Clearly, given the diverse nature of our
society, and the relative poverty and ignorance prevailing,
FPTP system has accentuated our problems and led to a deep
political crisis. Our familiarity with British institutions
and practices made us accept FPTP as the only natural electoral
system. But only 10 countries - Bangladesh, Canada, India,
Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, UK, US, Zambia -
follow FPTP system in single-member constituencies. Even
Australia (alternative vote) and New Zealand (proportional
representation), though former British colonies, have different
systems. In fact, 43 functioning democracies have other
systems of election. of these, 36 countries follow proportional
representation (PR). PR is a system by which a party's overall
voting percentage determines its representation in legislature.
PR
differs from FPTP in three critical ways. First, the party's
image and platform determine the outcome. Therefore, the
party does not have to depend on local fiefdoms and crime
lords for success. Honest and decent candidates can be nominated
by the party in the list. Second, electoral success does
not depend on the plurality of votes in any constituency,
and all votes polled in favour of a party in a whole state
or country count. Therefore, there is no incentive to spend
exorbitant sums to buy votes locally. Third, scattered minorities
will get representation as their overall vote counts, even
though they may not have concentrated pockets of influence.
PR thus radically alters the nature of elections and removes
many distortions plaguing our democracy. When Gandhiji and
Ambedkar had their famous disagreement on Dalit representation,
they both were looking for a solution within the familiar
British model. Reservation of Constituencies was the resultant
compromise whereas PR would have met the requirements of
all!
Even
now, India is stuck with FPTP despite the fact that UK itself
is embracing PR. European Parliament members in UK, and
regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
are all elected through PR! Macaulay's prophesy that Indians
would be the last surviving Englishmen has come true in
a strange way!
Certainly
there are problems in PR too. First, party leaders will
become all-powerful if they are allowed to determine party
candidates' lists. Therefore choice of candidates and their
order of appearance on the list must be based on voting
by members or their delegates in each region or district.
Second, given our diversity and primordial caste loyalties,
in PR system there is a danger of every caste forming a
party and fragmenting our polity. In the post-mandal India,
this is highly probable. This fragmentation can be prevented
by having a reasonable threshold, of say 10 percent of the
vote in a major state, as the minimum requirement for a
party to get its members elected. Third, in PR the link
between a territorial constituency and a member will disappear.
This can be overcome by electing half the members through
FPTP as now, and the other half drawn from party lists based
on PR, in such a manner that the legislature will reflect
the overall voting preference. This is the mixed system
based on plurality and corrective PR, as practised in six
countries - Bolivia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand
and Venezuela. There will be two votes - one for a candidate,
and another for a party.
It
is time we made our elections clean, fair, fully representative
and hospitable for honest candidates. Funding reform was
only a first step. Proportional representation is an idea
whose time has come.
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