Chennai: It is most ironic that M. Karunanidhi should be speaking up now about the need for a debate on proportional representation as opposed to the Westminster model of First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) model of democracy that we follow in India.
His party DMK enjoyed power periodically between 1967 and 2011 to the extent of being the ruling party in Tamil Nadu solely because of the UK model of the popular vote on the basis of which the leading candidate is chosen from a bunch for having received the most number of votes.
Democracy may be a flawed method to choose a government. But, is there a real alternative in this world? History records that democracy itself has been criticised by great thinkers like Plato who believed democracy meant the rule of the ignorant over the wise. It has become fashionable now to knock democracy because the latest results — state and national — may not have pleased certain sections of people including some prominent politicians and those who like to believe they are intellectuals.
Suddenly, a 31 per cent share of the national vote that enables the winning of enough seats for one party to be capable of nominating the Prime Minister is being slated. Parties that had been reaping the fruits of the system for decades find themselves marginalised by the same system now. The results are particularly galling for the DMK (with 26.8 per cent of the popular vote) which
has no MPs in the Lok Sabha after the 2014 polls.
These fallacies of the Westminster mode of elections cut both ways. The AIADMK (with 34.84 per cent of the popular vote) had no MPs in the people’s House for five years from 2004 but initiated no talk on changing to proportional representation so that the party could still have MPs after losing out. Living with zero presence is tough for parties with a following, but where is the alternative?
There is no reason to complain as the Indian system also accommodates the proportional representation mode in the Rajya Sabha where the members of the state legislatures (MLAs) vote on the direct transfer vote system. The bicameral system has allowed the DMK to enjoy the fruits of PR too. The presence of Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi in the upper house was made possible by the number of MLAs the DMK has in the state legislature besides what it can cobble up in any alliance strategy.
In 2014, the big push for change at the national level led to a record breaking turnout at the voting booths in numbers as well as percentages. If anger is seen to be reflected in the vote for change, is there room for grievance on the part of the losers? Apathy might have kept a large number of voters out while imperfect electoral rolls may have contributed a bit towards this too.
The principle of the winner being the one with the most votes from those polled has not been vitiated by this, regardless of what the losers and the critics say.
Plato is said to have once called democracy a “theatre-ocracy” with the hoi-polloi gaping at the career politicians on the stage and voting for the ones who made the best speeches or offered the juiciest freebies. In Tamil Nadu, there has never been a shortage of either commodity — rhetoric or promise of freebies.
Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy being “the worst form of government apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time” may also ring a bell here. The right to express their own opinion at the polling booth makes democracy the favourite of the people.
It is an accident of history that large tracts of the English-speaking or the UK-ruled world adopted the Westminster style of democracy although some like Australia have adapted to bring in the PR principle too,
This has, over time, been seen to favour the big political parties at the expense of the smaller ones, which is another reason why the biggies on the Indian scene have no cause to complain now.
