:: P.C. Alexander

Karnataka polls stress on electoral reforms

Dr P.C. Alexander

No election to a state Assembly has been subjected to so much of post mortem analysis as the recent election to the Karnataka Assembly. Yet the core issues involved in the elections — the non-democratic functioning of the political parties and the distortion of representative credentials of those elected — have remained unaddressed.

The Congress party’s performance in the Karnataka was no doubt a failure but that was not unexpected. The Congress has been on a fast course of decline ever since its spectacular win in 1984. The steep fall in its share in the percentage of votes should have rung alarm bells loud and clear. However, the slight increase to 145 seats in the 2004 elections was wrongly taken as a sign of "revival" for the party.

The opportunity to form a government at the Centre, though with 14 partners and the support from outside of about 60 MPs from the Left parties, had unfortunately created the illusion that the party was on a comeback course. This had prevented the Congress from turning the searchlight inside and taking corrective measures well before the elections. The very fact that it had to make several compromises on its ideologies and policies in order to retain its ministerial chair at the Centre had become a cause of its steady decline in the last four years.

A reverse in Karnataka was bound to happen and every impartial observer knew it would. The Congress, however, hung on to the illusion that the "aam admi" was always with it and all that was needed was a last-hour high pressure campaign by the top leaders. But it was too late and too little to arrest the trend of failures.

The BJP would be making the same mistake if it believes that its victory in Karnataka is a key to power in all of southern India. Past experiences have clearly shown that the victory of a political party in one state in the South had, by itself, little impact on elections in any neighbouring state. If any generalisation can be made at all, it is that the South has in recent years shown an inclination to support regional parties, whether it is the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, the Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh or the Janata Party in Karnataka.

Similarly, the BJP and the Congress will be committing a mistake if they take the Karnataka result as a tombstone over the JD(S). An important point to be noted is that even though the number of JD(S) seats in the Assembly has been reduced from 59 to 28, its share in the votes fell only by 1.5 per cent from the previous elections.

Karnataka elections have confirmed not just the trend of decline for the Congress or the JD(S), but the failure of the party system itself and the inadequacies of the electoral system as practiced in our country. The Karnataka elections have served to indicate the urgency and importance of radical changes in both the electoral system and the management of political parties.

Let us first consider the failure of the electoral system.

While adopting the British system of parliamentary democracy, we had also adopted their system of "first past the post" as the winner in elections. But we have overlooked the fact that in Britain there are only three parties, though a few others also may become active at the time of elections. In India, however, the number of political parties, Independents and unregistered parties who contest the elections is so large that in several constituencies the results get distorted. As many as 801 state parties, 898 unregistered parties and 2,385 Independents had contested the 2004 elections. It is true that an overwhelming majority of these candidates had forfeited their deposits, but in many cases the presence of large number of non-serious candidates had caused confusion among the voters. It is only by tightening the rules regarding eligibility of candidates for contesting elections and penalties against non serious candidates that our electoral system can be saved.

The worst aspect of the present electoral system is the dilution of the representative credentials of those declared elected. In a system where several Independents and candidates belonging to unrecognised parties are allowed to contest, a person with even 12 per cent of the share of votes can get elected making a mockery of the concept of representative democracy.

The present system has enabled even very small caste-based or subcaste-based parties to get their candidates elected and in these days of coalition governments with 12 or 14 partners, some of these MPs have also become Cabinet ministers at the national level. With the multiplicity of parties and of Independent candidates there is little connection between the percentage of votes polled and the seats won.

The following examples of lack of correlation between the number of seats won and the share of votes polled will illustrate the inherent contradictions in the present system:

The BJP had secured about the same share of the votes polled in the 2004 elections as in the elections in 1989, but its seats in Parliament had declined from 182 to 138. The Telugu Desam had polled in 2004 just one per cent less than the vote share of the Congress, but the number of its seats in the Assembly had dropped from 180 to 47. In the 2006 Assembly elections, the DMK had only 26.5 per cent of the votes but got 96 seats while the AIADMK, which had 32.6 per cent of the votes, secured only 61 seats.

The remedy for such distortions in the votes polled and the seats secured is the "proportional representation" system which has proved to be quite successful in many European countries in recent years. In the absence of proportional representation, we will continue to have as legislators and ministers persons with very thin representative credentials and this is bound to dilute the principle that those who govern represent the majority of the people in their constituencies.

The second important and urgent reform needed is a legislation to enforce inner party democracy. In the absence of any law, political parties in India have become one-leader parties and we see the contradiction of a democratic administration being run by persons who do not practice democracy in their own parties.

In most of these parties elections have been substituted by nominations. The will of the party supremo is the only factor that matters in the selection of candidates for election or appointments to various party positions. The Karnataka polls have proved that leaders who do not run their parties democratically will not be able to enlist the support of the people.

Dr P.C. Alexander was formerly governor of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.