By Srinivas Kamat
The recent Srinagar bypoll in which by winning just about 4% of the votes polled of the total of some 7% votes, Farooq Abdullah was declared elected. Not only that the winner preened after the election and when asked about the low turnout, he declared that he could not let down those that came and voted! Is this not a mockery of democracy? When 93% of the electorate failed to turn up and vote for whatever reason should the election not have been declared void? We have quorums for common meetings like that of housing societies, company boards etc. but for elections why is there no stipulation of minimum turnout for the election to be declared valid? We should enact laws that unless there is a turnout of more than 50% an election will be countermanded. This will force not only the candidates to get more and more people to come out and vote and not concentrate just on their vote banks. The Election Commission can also thus work towards more people exercising their franchise. These measures will not only strengthen our democracy but also ensure that it is not reduced to a farce. We already have the EVM’s being questioned and there is every likelihood that the Supreme Court will make the paper trail through the VVPAT feature mandatory. Though this is unnecessary, given the present mood of the political parties in objecting to the use of EVM’s, we will have to concede to this request. At this juncture maybe we should question the basic nature of our election process and instead of continuing with the present ‘first past the post’ principle, meaning whoever gets the majority from the votes polled is declared the winner to ‘proportionate representation’ where the winner is declared only if he or she gets more than 50% of the votes polled in iterative rounds of polls in the constituency. The multiple polls in each constituency are feasible now with the use of EVM’s which drastically reduce the cost of holding elections. This will take care of another farce that we have in our election process like in the recent UP Assembly elections the BJP polled about 40% of the 64% voter turnout which means that they just got 25% of the people in the constituencies to vote for them. Thus the whopping majority of 75% of the people either did not vote for them or did not vote at all. But inspite of that we saw that the BJP had a landslide victory. If you put this up to our politicians they will shrug their shoulders and say that it is the present system and we are playing the game according to that. This is similar to what Farooq Abdullah as stated above, who did not want to ‘let down the people’ who had voted for him! While in the ‘proportionate representation’ system at least more than 50% of the people voting would have selected the winning candidate for an election that is valid only if more than 50% of the voters in the constituency have voted. We can make the election system better and truly representative in addition to the above by making voting compulsory and taking a decision on the funding of candidates who stand for elections.
