Whether the Indian electoral-governance matrix, premised as it is on the British Westminster model, was the appropriate choice to deal with complexities of governing post-colonial India is a debate that has been going on for the past 75 years. And one can be sure it will continue in future decades.
After all, calls for a so-called Second Republic have been aired in India for a while now. Arguments and counter-arguments on the merits of a Presidential system as opposed to the extant Parliamentary system for the country too continue to be made. The debate on which method of making the vote count, as it were, and best reflects the Indian electorate’s will – proportional representation or the current first-past-post-the-post, winner-takes-all electoral approach – also have passionate adherents on either side.
But this is not an essay on these lofty debates. Rather, it a practical itemisation of the lessons stakeholders in the Indian political system could learn, if they so choose, from what has just gone down in the United Kingdom. As the headlines in the global media understandably highlight the Labour Party’s landslide electoral victory in the July 2024 General Election, which delivered its best showing in terms of number of seats won since the 1920s, there are some critical minutiae that seem to have been lost in the focus on Labour’s stupendous win. These hold lessons for India which follows much the same electoral system as the UK.
First, the Labour Party, while it emerged the winner in 412 Parliamentary seats in the 650-member House of Commons, did so on the basis of only 34% of the popular vote. Replace the Labour Party with BJP and the House of Commons with the Lok Sabha, and the parallels are eerie (albeit the BJP’s vote share has been a few percentage points more than Labour’s over the past three Lok Sabha polls.)
Secondly, the Conservative Party, in winning a measly 121 seats, did not completely collapse in terms of percentage of votes cast in its favour as some political pundits were predicting, which stood at 24%. Think of the Congress Party and the narrative shaped by BJP-simpatico media that India’s Grand Old Party is in terminal decline to understand the similarity. Indeed, the Congress too has been winning about 20-22% of the vote on average in three successive Indian elections beginning 2014.
Thirdly, the Eurosceptic Reform UK Party led by the controversial Nigel Farage won four million votes, which is about 15% of the popular vote, but ended up with just four seats. This compares to the traditional third party in British electoral politics, the Liberal Democratic Party, which won as many as 71 seats with a mere 12% of the national vote. Readers may decide which parties in the Indian set-up correspond with the smaller British parties such as the LDP and Reform to reach their own conclusions.
The fact remains, as the BBC pointed out in its coverage of the UK Election, that the disparity between the vote-share of parties and the seats won by them has been the highest in British history at 30%. Disproportionate representation, anyone?
The short point for Indian political parties which still operate within the ambit of the Westminster system despite desi variations, is that political parties will win some polls and lose others, but the structural issues in the Indian electoral system will have to addressed urgently to prevent a perversity in the name of democracy. For that to happen, however, these issues need to be debated and decided both within party fora and in public discourse. There is, unfortunately, no sign of that happening anytime soon. Readers may decide which parties in the Indian set-up correspond with the smaller British parties such as the LDP and Reform to reach their own conclusions.
The fact remains, as the BBC pointed out in its coverage of the UK Election, that the disparity between the vote-share of parties and the seats won by them has been the highest in British history at 30%. Disproportionate representation, anyone?
The short point for Indian political parties which still operate within the ambit of the Westminster system despite desi variations, is that political parties will win some polls and lose others.
