Lok Sabha

Prannoy Roy

Samajwadi Party

Karnataka

By Vivek KaulThe election for the 17this supposed to start from tomorrow. India has a first-past-the-post electoral system, which means that the candidate who gets the maximum number of votes, wins, even though a larger section of voters may have voted against him or her.This leads to something very peculiar.and Dorab R Sopariwala discuss this phenomenon in detail in their book The Verdict—Decoding India’s Elections.As they write: “The first national opinion poll in India was conducted ahead of the second Lok Sabha elections, in 1957. It was carried out by… Eric PW da Costa.”Eric da Costa coined the term, the ‘Congress multiplier’. As Roy and Sopariwala define it: “The seats won always worked to the advantage of the majority party. Thus, the Congress could keep on winning indefinitely, so long as the opposition was divided.”Which is precisely how things played out for nearly three decades. It was only when the opposition came together in the form of the Janata Party in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections, that the Congress lost.The Janata Party polled around 41.3% of the votes. This led to the party winning 295 seats or more than 54% of the seats in the Lok Sabha. The Congress party, which was the second largest party, got 34.5% of the votes and won 154 seats or 28.4% of the seats in the Lok Sabha.The difference in votes of the Janata Party and the Congress was around 7%, but it led to the Janata Party winning 141 seats more in the Lok Sabha. So, the multiplier which used to work for the Congress, changed sides in 1977. With the opposition parties coming together, they avoided the vote split.As Roy and Soparilwala write: “India has always had a large number of parties which first split the non-Congress vote and in more recent times split the non-BJP vote.” Take the case of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) won 31.3% of the votes and 282 seats or close to 52% of the seats in the Lok Sabha. The Congress won 19.5% of the votes and 44 seats or a little over 8% of the seats in the Lok Sabha.The multiplier worked for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Other than the opposition votes splitting, what also matters is, how concentrated the votes of a political party are. Are they concentrated in a few areas which will help the party win seats or are they all over the place and won’t make any difference in the overall scheme of things?Take the example of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 2014. It won 4.2% of the votes polled all over the country. But these votes did not translate into any seats. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) won 3.3% of the votes and nine seats in the Lok Sabha, simply because its vote share was more concentrated.With this dynamic being at the heart of the Indian electoral system, if opposition parties need to dislodge the party in power, alliances among them become very important. An excellent example of this is the 2017 state assembly election in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP got 39.7% of the votes and 312 seats or 57.5% of the seats in the state assembly. The BSP won 22.8% of the votes and 19 seats in the state assembly. Thewon 21.82% and 47 seats.Of course, the votes of BSP and SP put together were more than that of the BJP. Both the parties learnt quickly from their 2017 defeat and have aligned in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections to ensure that the multiplier effect works in their favour. A similar thing is playing out inwith the Congress and the JD(S) forming an alliance and hoping that the multiplier works in their favour. In the 2018 state assembly elections, the parties got 56.4% of the votes polled. This did not translate into an adequate number of seats because the parties were not in an alliance. This time they are.At a broader level what this also tells us is that this election will be an election of alliances, both before and after the election.(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy).