Ambedkar, Gandhi and Patel: The Making of India's Electoral System

By Raja Sekhar Vundru

In 1931 Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. B R Ambedkar met in London and clashed on the future of India's electoral system. Later in 1932 when the British announced reserved seats for dalits, Gandhi went on a fast unto death. Ambedkar saved his life by agreeing to the changed terms of representation, which changed the course of electoral system of India.

The Gandhi - Ambedkar engagement was only on the electoral system and method of election by separate electorates which Muslims enjoyed till then. Till the partition of India in 1947, the draft Constitution provided reserved seats for minorities and Dalits, which Sardar Patel chose to abolish. The fate of India's electoral system shifted to Ambedkar and Sardar Patel after Gandhi's assassination in 1948. Sardar Patel tried to abolish reserved seats for Dalits also in 1948 only to be thwarted by Ambedkar. Those reserved seats continue.

Based on a singular pursuit of tracing the electoral system and methods that define India-the world's largest democracy, this book is the first to document the evolution and account of electoral history of colonial and independent India. Do we know how Sardar Patel and Gandhi used electoral system to integrate India? Since the first provincial elections in 1937, do we know that double member constituencies existed till 1961, only to be abolished by Jawaharlal Nehru? Do we know that Ambedkar lost his first election in independent India because voters threw away their ballots? If we need women reserved seats, we need to know that we might have to try to double member constituencies. This book tells all.

The story of electoral thoughts and ideas of Ambedkar, Gandhi and Patel and Ambedkar's struggle to get a representative electoral system appear for the first time in a book. In India only election results are predicted, analysed and compiled. The electoral method that determines India's every election comes into focus in this book. Can any political party get away without offering tickets to one minority community or Dalits? The history is the answer to the future - through this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789386826244

Book preview

Epilogue

Prologue

Elections are always fascinating, important and most of the times, crucial as they always decide who eventually will be representing the people in a democracy. In the Presidential elections of November 2016 in United States of America, Donald Trump of the Republican Party was elected as the President defeating his rival from the Democratic Party Hillary Clinton under an Electoral College system. However, Trump lost to Clinton by almost eight million votes at the national count. This dichotomy has resulted in questioning the electoral system under which the USA elects its President and the representatives to its legislative bodies.

An electoral system is one which translates votes into seats, thereby enabling a government elected by the people in a democracy. In the case of the Presidential election in the US, it is the total number of seats, also called Electoral College votes, that a candidate needs to win and not the total votes polled country-wide. Like India, the USA also follows what is called the First Past The Post (FPTP) System where in an electoral constituency or seat, ‘the candidate to whom the largest number of valid votes have been given’ is declared elected. In the American Presidential election, a candidate must win the 270-Electoral College votes out of the 538 to become the President. Each state has a fixed number of such votes - California has 55, Texas 38, Florida 29 and so on. The system is so designed that whosoever gets the highest number of votes in a state will win all the Electoral College votes available from that State. This is known as winner-takes-all. But the winner is not bound to get more than fifty percent vote like in French presidential election. California state has 55 electoral college votes and Clinton with 61.6 per cent was a clear winner. But it was a close call in many states. In New Hampshire, Clinton got 348,521 (47.6 per cent) and Trump 345,789 (47.2 per cent) and the winner of that state, by a narrow margin of 2,732 votes, took all the four electoral college votes. In the 2016 election, the national popular vote of that country, total votes polled all over the country irrespective of states, was 64,874,143 (48.1per cent) in favour of the defeated candidate and the winner got 62,516,883 (46.4 per cent). None of the candidates however received an absolute majority of fifty percent votes and above, like in a French Presidential election.

In India’s electoral system, votes translate into seats for a political party or for independent candidates. India also follows the First Past the Post (FPTP) System, a British legacy. But, it was retained by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the other constitution makers as the appropriate system for a country like India over other available electoral systems. The FPTP electoral system is the simplest. Irrespective of the number of candidates contesting, whosoever gets the highest number of votes wins, even if the margin is just one vote. In the Karnataka State Assembly elections of 2004, the Indian National Congress Party (INC) candidate Dhruvanarayana won the Santhemarahalli seat by a margin of one vote. Sometimes, the number of votes received by the winning candidate may be just one-third of the total votes polled. In India, a political party normally forms the government with a vote percentage of just above thirty per cent of the total votes polled in the state elections or the national elections. The losing political party may not be lagging behind but by a margin of one or two percentage difference. In the State Assembly elections of 2007 in Uttar Pradesh, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) secured 206 out of 403 seats with 30.43 per cent of the votes while Samajwadi Party (SP) won only 97 seats with 26.07 per cent of the votes. In the Assembly elections of 2012, in the same state, there was a reversal. The SP won the election with 224 seats for 29.29 per cent votes and the BSP won only 80 seats with a 25.95 per cent of the votes. The best feature of the FPTP is that it creates stable governments by granting a reasonably good majority for the winning party.

Another aspect of any electoral system is representation. It means a form of government where the law-making responsibility is delegated by the citizens to the duly elected representatives of the people. The Parliament or an Assembly, therefore, could be said to be ‘representative’ because it constitutes the elected people. The typical ‘Member of Parliament’ in India, as in the European democracies, has appeared everywhere with remarkably few variants: he is male, mature, middle class, well-educated and increasingly as also likely to be a professional politician. Generally speaking, groups such as women, manual workers, religious minorities and in the case of India specifically, Dalits or tribals, have always remained under-represented or represented inappropriately.

Political representation which forms the crux of any democracy has four main aspects. It is about

(i) who is representing

(ii) who is being represented

(iii) what is being represented; and

(iv) how is the representation taking place.

Hanna Pitkin, American political theorist, defines representation as the activity of making citizens’ voices, opinions and perspectives ‘present’ in the public policy-making processes.¹ It means that the necessary conditions for the political representation to occur, the political actors should speak, advocate, symbolise and act on behalf of those whom they represent in the political arena. It is a kind of political assistance that was expected from the political representatives.

Normally, this should raise a question as to the representative character of the candidate who wins an election with just one-third of the votes polled under the FPTP system and the rest seventy per cent not in favour of the winning candidate! It becomes a more curious case where normally votes polled in elections get an average sixty per cent of the total voters in the entire constituency! Thereby, it can be safely assumed that the winning candidate has secured just above twenty per cent of the votes of the total electorate in a constituency and is still expected to represent all the interests of that constituency. Many elected representatives in India believe that they won because of a powerful community chunk of votes. They feel that they are answerable to those castes or communities which helped them in the electoral win and tend to ignore the dalits and minorities. This happens because the dalit or minority votes polled as a single chunk cannot win elections as they are a numerical minority.

The prime requirement of an election is an electoral system which enables the citizens of a nation to elect their legislative members and, in many cases, the head of the state. Electoral system means all the structures and operations that are used to run an election such as:

(i) The method of delimiting electoral constituency boundaries

(ii) The qualification of voters and candidates

(iii) The electoral method of voting

(iv) The means of settling disputes.²

Mostly people perceive that electoral method is simply nothing but a voting method, where the election of a winner is decided.³ In India, electoral method becomes crucial with a multi-caste, multi-religious and deeply unequal society. India till now has employed only a simplistic FPTP system, declaring the one who gets the highest number of votes as the winner.

The primary purpose of an electoral system is to translate the will of the voters, as expressed through the ballot box (or an electronic version of it), into members of a legislative body. The ways this can be achieved are many and varied. Electoral systems throughout the world vary from one another. There are a host of electoral systems used for national elections in different countries. Countries deploy or evolve an electoral system, mostly given the nature of its social composition. India deployed the FPTP with reserved seats for the dalits, and the tribals in the Parliament and Assemblies and added women and backward castes in local bodies like urban municipalities and rural bodies like the panchayats.

Electoral systems are simply just not a neutral statistical arrangement that enable ‘Members of Parliament’ and ‘Members of Legislative Assemblies’, to be chosen for a legislature. Normally, the electoral system adopted by a nation, depends more on the country’s political past rather than the relative merits of different voting methods.⁴ More often, it was seen that the electoral system of a particular country certainly has to be based on several factors such as historical, economic and social than merely political. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Stockholm classifies electoral systems deployed in various countries into three groups: Plurality system; Majoritarian system and Proportional representation system.

Plurality systems are always with single-member electorates or constituencies, like India. It is the simplest of all electoral systems. India and the USA deploy this system. Plurality systems are commonly used for the election of the Heads of State through the first-past-the-post method as in the USA. By this electoral method, a candidate contesting an election is declared the winner if he or she receives the highest number or percentage of the votes.

Normally, a majority vote is fifty per cent plus one vote. In the plurality system, it is not necessary to get fifty per cent and above vote. Regardless of whether the vote received is majority or not, the candidate will be declared elected. In the American Presidential election, each state is won by the candidate who receives the highest number of votes which will be translated into electoral votes. India, after gaining independence, adopted plurality systems for the election of representatives to the state legislatures and the Parliament. Before the Independence in 1947, India deployed the FPTP system with several variants of electoral methods. Ambedkar wrote a treatise on the electoral system during that period in his 1945 magnum opus What Congress and Gandhi have done to untouchables. No other political leader showed a greater importance and depth of understanding of the electoral systems than Ambedkar.

Among the electoral methods under the FPTP system in British India, the most important of them was the reserved seats with a ‘Separate Electorate’ for religious minorities. In his 1945 book, Ambedkar explains separate electorate: ‘They are designed to give representation to specified Communities, namely, Muslims, Indian Christians, Europeans and Anglo-Indians. The voters of each of these Communities in a given area are grouped into one Electorate, separate from the rest. They elect a voter of their Community as their representative exclusively by their own votes. The governing feature of a separate electorate is that in an election through a separate electorate only voters of a Community can vote and stand for election. If it is a Muslim Electorate the voter and the candidate must be a Musalman; if it is a Christian, Electorate the voter and the candidate must be a Christian and so on. The election is decided by a majority of votes cast by voters of the particular community’⁵.

In the elections⁶ to the Provinces or State Assemblies in India in the years 1937 and 1946, there were Separate Electorate Constituencies for religious minorities. Out of the 1,585 assembly seats in eleven Provinces, the Sikhs had 34 separate electorate seats in two provinces. The Muslims had 482 seats, Anglo-Indians had 11seats, the Europeans had 24 seats and the Indian Christians had 20 seats. Out of the separate electorate seats 13 were reserved for women belonging to the minorities. In case of the untouchables or dalits, Ambedkar won Separate electorate seats from the British, which was thwarted by Mahatma Gandhi in 1932. Under a threat to fast unto death by Gandhi, the untouchable seats were merged with the General Seats. The formula that worked out under the shadow of fast unto death by Gandhi was that Dalits will have reserved seats out of the General seats. Under this electoral reservation, by an agreement called the Poona Pact on 24 September 1932 between Gandhi and Ambedkar, Dalit reserved candidates will be elected by a joint voting of Hindu voters and dalit voters. This was called the Joint Electorate. Ambedkar explains: ‘A General Electorate is the normal usual form of the electorate, an electorate which comprises of voters of all communities living in an area but which are outside the system of Separate Electorates. It is called a General Electorate because it is an electorate in which neither community nor religion finds any recognition. It is an electorate of the Rest ie other than Muslims, Indian Christians, Europeans and Anglo-Indians. In a General Electorate: No voter who is in a Separate Electorate has a right to vote in or stand for election. Every voter who is on its electoral roll has a right to vote and to stand for election without reference to his caste, creed or community. The result of the election is determined by a simple majority of votes cast’.⁷

In the elections of 1937 and under the same formula in the elections of 1946 also, the General seats were virtually Hindu seats, since all other religious minorities were having their own separate electorates. Out of the 808 general seats in the Provincial assemblies, 24 seats were reserved for women. In the Bombay Province, seven seats out of 114 general seats were reserved for the Marathas. There were 24 special seats for the representatives from backward areas and tribes falling in six provinces.

The reserved seats for the dalits were 151 in all eleven provinces, this was where only dalits could contest but voters comprised of both Hindus and dalits. Under the Poona Pact, the method of electing dalits in reserved constituencies was decided to be a two-stage election. First round or the primary election was like a Separate Electorate. The first round was expected to send a panel of four candidates to the final round, where both the Hindu and dalit voters of that constituency will elect a candidate among the panel of four by simple majority. There was no first round polling conducted, if the number of candidates who filed their nominations were four or less.

Another feature of the pre-Independence 1937 and 1946 elections was the multi-member constituencies. Invariably, wherever reserved seats for dalits were present, a two-member or three-member constituency went for elections. In such elections, voters were given two or three ballots, as the case may be, and were told to poll one vote for each candidate. The constituency would then return two or three candidates by the FPTP method. These elections were held under a limited franchise and these were where only few citizens, among those who paid taxes, educated or landholders or army personnel were eligible to be enrolled as voters. The double or triple member constituencies continued in free India for two general elections.

The electoral system of 1937 also had a feature of non-territorial constituencies. In such constituencies, there were no specific geographical areas of delimitation that defined the electorate. These were for special interest groups. The Commerce, Industry, Mining and Planting had 56 seats in ten provinces elected from an electorate constituting the members of Chambers of Merchants, Industry, Mining and Plantations. There were 37 seats in ten provinces reserved for the Landholders; eight seats for the Universities and 38 Labour seats.

On the one hand, the FPTP electoral method is praised for its simple and uncomplicated functioning and speedy outcome, and is believed to keep the link clear between voters and elected leaders. On the other hand, it has been criticised for transforming a small share of votes into eligibility for ruling. It tends to favour a two-party system and discourage the development of third parties. As this system gives a seat only to the winner of each constituency, a political party which consistently comes third in every constituency will not gain any seats in the legislature, even if it receives a significant proportion of the vote. This happened with the BSP and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in their initial days. This puts thinly spread smaller parties at a significant disadvantage geographically and creates an artificial limit on the level at which smaller parties can engage in the political process. The FPTP was continued by the makers of India’s new constitution because, India shifted from limited franchise to universal adult franchise, and the simplicity of the voting method.

One can find several such examples throughout the world and in India. The chances are very rare that a government in any state or even at the Centre in India can be formed with a fifty plus one percentage of votes. The highest was the landslide election in 1985 for the INC which received 48.1 per cent votes and gained 405 (74.6 per cent) seats. On the contrary, there have been several occasions when the proportion of seats in an Assembly or Parliament has been significantly less than their proportion of the state or national vote. Post-emergency, Indira Gandhi of the INC lost elections in 1977 but polled a significant 34.5 per cent but won only 154 seats which accounted for 28.4 per cent of the seats.

The use of the first-past-the-post in India has, on maximum occasions, resulted in the election of a government that has not received support from a majority of the electorate, or even the largest number of votes. But this system also helps in providing stability to a government which normally wins a majority seats even at a smaller margin ahead of its immediate rival party. The BSP in 2007 won 204 seats with a margin of 4.3 percentage votes against the SP. In turn, the SP won 224 seats in 2012 with a margin of 4.5 per cent votes against the BSP. For a nation like India, stability of governments helps in growth and structured policies and programs.

There are many variants of the FPTP system. In countries with weak political parties or non-existent political parties due to historic or ethnic, geographical or population conditions, Block Vote method is used. It is common in island countries such as Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Maldives, Tonga and Tuvalu and in Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, the Palestine, the Syrian Arab Republic. Block vote is simply where a constituency has multiple members to be elected. A voter is given as many ballot papers for as many candidates. The voters are free to vote irrespective of party affiliation. This results in strong individual candidates.

Another variant is Party Block Vote employed in only four countries; Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti and Singapore in multi-member constituencies. Here voters vote for a political party. Whichever party gets the highest votes in that constituency takes all the seats in that multi-member constituency. Countries like Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, use what is called Alternate Vote system. Here voters give preference on ballot to candidates as first preference and second preference in single-member constituencies. This resulted in the much required cooperative politics where candidates announce broad based appeal to reach out to their non-supporters also. This was also employed in Mayoral elections in London and San Francisco.

Majority electoral system, the second major electoral system, ensures the victory of a candidate in a constituency by requiring the winner to receive an absolute majority (more than half) of the vote, meaning a minimum of fifty per cent plus one vote.

Such a majority, obviously, cannot be achieved through a single ballot system or in the first round of polling. Therefore, it requires a second ballot in a second round of polling by means of preferential voting. This is called the second ballot system. The second ballot system is restricted to electing members from single-member constituencies.⁹ In the first round itself, if a candidate receives more than half of the votes, the person is declared elected.

Two-Round systems is the most popular method in 22 countries for direct election of presidents. France and many former French colonies such as the Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), Gabon, Mali, Mauritania and Togo employ the method as also in Egypt, the Comoros Islands, Haiti, Iran, Kiribati and Viet Nam, some post-Soviet republics such as Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

In the French presidential election of 2014, a total of six candidates contested and none of them received a majority vote. In those electorates where no candidate receives more than half the vote, there will be a second or run-off, ballot slip. This may be held between the top two candidates on the first count or between candidates who receive a certain percentage of the vote. The second ballot system prevents the election of any candidate without an absolute majority of the vote, thus overcoming one of the main criticisms of plurality systems. Second Ballot system is more likely to be used in presidential elections rather than for legislative elections.

However, this system has its own disadvantages. The principal disadvantage of majority systems is that results do not always reflect the wishes of the electorate. The party winning the majority of the national vote may not necessarily win a majority of the parliamentary seats and can sometimes be capricious in its practical application by favouring the election of the least unfavoured, rather than the most popular, candidate. It also results in greater expense for the candidates and parties involved, creating greater inconveniences for the electors and delay the result of an election, causing uncertainty.

Third larger category of electoral system is the proportional representation system (PR). As it indicates, it a simple system under which legislative seats are won by parties in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote they gain. By necessity, this requires more than one seat in an electorate, so multi-member constituencies are used. The more parliamentarians there are to be elected from an electorate, the smaller the percentage of the vote that is required and thus, the more proportional the overall election result is likely to be.

The rationale underpinning all the PR systems is the conscious translation of a party’s share of votes into a corresponding proportion of seats in the legislature.¹⁰ To avoid candidates being elected with very few votes, some countries establish an ‘electoral threshold’. This is the minimum vote percentage that a candidate or party must exceed in order to gain parliamentary representation — examples include Germany in which the threshold is 5 per cent, 4 per cent in Italy and 1.5 per