India remains by far the largest
democracy in the world, with over 670 million electors in the parliamentary
election of 2004. Its parliamentary government and FPTP electoral system are a
legacy of British colonialism, which ended in 1947.
The British
introduced self-government to India
in stages, and it was not until the end of colonial rule and the adoption of
the Indian Constitution in November 1949 by a Constituent Assembly that
universal suffrage was achieved.
The
Constituent Assembly, which comprised eminent jurists, lawyers, constitutional
experts and political thinkers, and laboured for almost three years, debated at
great length which electoral system would be best suited to India before finally choosing to
retain the FPTP electoral system. Various systems of proportional
representation were considered and attracted many advocates, given India’s
extremely diverse and multi-ethnic society, but FPTP was chosen, mainly to
avoid fragmented legislatures and to help the formation of stable
governments—stability being a major consideration in a country emerging from
immediate post-colonial communal bloodshed and with widespread poverty and
illiteracy.
Under the
Indian Constitution, voters elect a 543-member Lok Sabha, or lower house, from
single-member districts. By contrast, the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya
Sabha or Council of States, and the corresponding upper houses of some states,
are indirectly elected by members of the state legislative assemblies. There
are also a president and vice-president who are indirectly elected by the
members of parliament and state legislative assemblies.
General
elections are held once every five years, but the president may dissolve the
Lok Sabha on the advice of the prime minister before its term is over, as in
the recent case of 2004, or if he or she is convinced that no stable government
can be formed, as in 1991. The prime minister holds office for as long as he or
she can command a majority in the Lok Sabha. All the successive Congress Party
governments which ruled India
continuously until 1977 served for almost five years, close to the maximum
allowed in the constitution. From 1977 to 1997, governments were less stable,
and a number of prime ministers had to resign as a result of party splits or
votes of no confidence before completing their full term. Since 1997, a period
of stability seems to be emerging again, now under coalitions of parties.
All these
political environments have arisen from the same FPTP electoral system. The
major effect of the electoral system until 1977 was to guarantee majority
governments based on a minority of voter support. The FPTP electoral system
initially resulted in the ruling Congress Party securing stable majorities in
the Lok Sabha, usually against a fragmented opposition. This fragmentation was
characterized by a rise in popularity for regional and state parties in some
areas. When the opposition parties combined to form coalitions and started
putting up common candidates against the Congress candidates (as was the case
in the 1977 and 1989 general elections), the Congress majorities vanished.
Moreover, the nature of the system meant that small changes in share of the
vote often had a dramatic impact upon the number of parliamentary seats won, as
the following table, relating votes for the Congress Party to the number of
seats won at successive elections, illustrates.
The Congress Party’s Performance in Indian
General Elections: The dramatically large effect of the FPTP electoral system
on the number of seats with slight changes in voting
The same
disproportionality between the share of votes obtained and the share of parliamentary
seats won under the Indian FPTP electoral system can be seen in the case of the
other major political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which led a
coalition government up to 2004.
Thus the
overall results of elections to the Lok Sabha have not been anywhere near
proportional. Support can often be divided by setting candidates of the same
caste, religion or region against each other. In this context, FPTP gives an
incentive to electoral participants to encourage multiple candidacies by their
opposition, and its effect can be to produce a winner who has much less than an
absolute majority of the total vote. However, despite the divided nature of India’s
multi-ethnic democracy, the electoral system has retained a considerable degree
of support, due in part to the practice of reserving seats for socially
underprivileged and historically disadvantaged groups known as scheduled castes
and scheduled tribes. These communities are thinly spread all over India,
and the classical operation of FPTP would have resulted in them getting a
comparatively very small number of parliamentary seats. The constitution,
however, reserves districts for them in proportion to their numbers in the
population, thus reserving 79 seats for the 15 per cent scheduled castes
population and 41 seats for the 8 per cent scheduled tribes population. In
these districts, although all electors have voting rights, only a member of the
scheduled caste or tribe may stand for election. This has ensured that their
parliamentary representation is in line with their proportion of the
population.
A
constitutional amendment which seeks to reserve 33 per cent of seats for women
representatives at the national- and state-level legislatures has long been
debated, but without any success so far, although 33 per cent of the seats have
been reserved for women at the Panchayat (district) level, the third tier of
government, since 1993. The depth of popular support for the integrity of the
electoral system became evident in 1977 when the election of the incumbent
prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was set aside by a court after Congress had won
a two-thirds legislative majority in 1971. She responded by curtailing
fundamental constitutional rights for two years (1975–77), an authoritarian
interlude in India’s
otherwise unbroken history of competitive democracy. In the 1977 elections, her
government lost power through a fair poll, signalling the unwillingness of India’s
voters to accept undemocratic practices.
For a
period of 20 years, from 1977 to 1997, the FPTP electoral system seemed to have
ushered in an era of instability, principally because of the formation of
coalitions without common principles and the pursuit of narrow self-interest by
political parties. The non-Congress opposition parties (without the communists)
took over in government in 1977 by uniting into a composite entity, the Janata
Party. It split within two years. In December 1989, a successor party, the
Janata Dal, came to power, supported by the communist parties and the Hindu
revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); this government lasted ten months. At
the general election of 1996, no party was able to form a stable government.
The BJP won 161 seats and the Congress 140. But the strength of the electoral
system re-emerged in 1999 when a firm alliance of parties under the leadership
of the BJP was able to form a government and almost complete its full term. Similarly,
after the May 2004 general election, the Indian National Congress Party, along
with left parties and others, formed a coalition government at the national
level.
In 2000,
the government of India
established a National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution.
This commission’s consultation process considered whether various provisions
relating to the electoral process in the constitution should be amended or
expanded. Its report, submitted to the government in 2002, recommended against
any constitutional change in the electoral field, emphasizing that such changes
as were needed could be brought about by amendments in the ordinary electoral
legislation and even by subordinate legislation or executive instructions.
However, the National Commission also observed that, at the last three general
elections at national level, an average of two-thirds of Indian MPs had been
elected under FPTP without a majority of 50 per cent plus one and with a plurality
only, and considered the questions this raises about the legitimacy of
representation. As a consequence, and in the context of the nationwide
introduction of electronic voting which then took place in 2004, the National
Commission recommended that the government and the Election Commission of India
conduct a careful and full examination of the introduction of a Two-Round
system, with the second round conducted between the two leading candidates in
each district on the day after the first round. The report of the Election
Commission of India following the 2004 election did not follow up on this
proposal, although it did recommend both the introduction of a ‘none of these
candidates’ option on ballot paper and the abolition of the provision by which
one person is able to stand in two different single-member districts.
The FPTP
electoral system is often said to work best in countries where there are two
major political parties. In India,
by contrast, the Congress Party ruled continuously at the centre from 1952 to
1977 without any viable opposition. This monopoly ended in 1977. From
single-party dominance, the pattern on the political arena changed, first to
one of a competition between a single party and a coalition of parties, and
from there to a competition between two coalitions of political parties—a trend
that continued at the 2004 general election. The BJP started its upward
mobility in the Indian Parliament with a shrill Hindu agenda, but after one
full term in office the imperatives of electoral politics compelled it to scale
down its ultra-rightist militant stance. It had to adopt an inclusive agenda,
enabling it to appeal to Muslim, tribal, backward class and other Dalit
(downtrodden) voters—who were once considered to be in the exclusive domain of
the Congress Party.
