Poll Reforms - Now is the Time

When India became independent, we adopted the British parliamentary system and electoral procedures. Little did we realize at that time that this system was full of flaws and needed to be replaced with a better system sooner or later. That time has come NOW.

One of the flaws of this system is the concept of “first-past-the-post”.

First-past-the-post voting means that the candidate who gets most votes in a constituency wins even if he or she falls short of 50 percent of the total votes cast.

In other words, such a candidate does not command the confidence of his constituency, let alone that of his State, country or region.

The second flaw is that the very political parties which form a coalition government at the Centre compete against one another at the regional level. This results in corruption and blackmail.

The third flaw is that the Prime Minister of a coalition government is often chosen on the basis of opportunistic political alliances before and after the elections rather than on the basis of his or her competence and acceptability by the majority of Members of Parliament. As if this were not enough, a Prime Minister chosen in this way has the power to dissolve Parliament and call for fresh elections to improve his or her chances of success in the next election.

To rectify these flaws the British government intends to hold a referendum on May 5, 2011 whether to keep “first-past-the-post” or to switch to another system known as the Alternative Vote (AV).

Under AV, if no candidate wins 50% of the votes, the second preferences of voters who picked last-placed candidates are redistributed until someone reaches the 50%. AV falls short of proportional representation, but is nevertheless an improvement on the current system.

Maybe the Indian political parties would like to follow the British precedent once again and try to improve our electoral system in the light of our experience during the last sixty years.

Pragmatism vs. Prudence

Prof. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2002. He teaches at Princeton University and is credited as being the founder of behavioural economics. According to him, political leaders have a tendency to take big decisions on the basis of impulse or intuition rather than on the basis of deliberate conscious calculation.

One of the most common problems, he points out, is overconfidence. “It is very common for people to have more confidence in their judgement than they should,” he says.

He believes that people make decisions on the basis of their past and present experience. They have no expertise in predicting the future. He believes that if decision makers considered the consequences of their actions, say after ten, fifteen or twenty years, they would arrive at a much better decision.

To prove his point he cites the Iraq war. “The big problem is that once the organization begins to make up its mind, everybody falls in line. And then the information that goes to the top gets biased. This is clearly something that happened with the Iraq war. What the decision makers wanted was known, and the intelligence community basically gave them the information they wanted – and of course, it turned out a disaster.”

The reason why I am mentioning all this is to point out that this is exactly what happened in the case of reservation for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes, Indo-US Nuclear Deal, and the same is going to happen in the case of Women’s Reservation Bill. Once we make a reservation on the basis of gender, how can we stop making similar reservations on the basis of caste, class, religion, language and region? Before taking big decisions, it is always better to think of their long-term consequences and make the right choices as far as possible

Let prudence take precedence over pragmatism.