Political Representation In India by Abhay V Datar;

Author:Abhay V Datar;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Constituent Assembly and After

Meanwhile, the real debate about constitution making was taking place in the various committees and sub-committees of the Constituent Assembly. They were concerned among other issues laying down the framework for the electoral system for a free India. The crucial question was once again how the minorities were to be represented. Once again, the two broad positions about political representation in India, the Institutionalist and the Processualist, could be discerned. The second position was stronger because the Congress dominated the constitution making process and the Muslim League had boycotted the Assembly.

While there was no opposition per se to the political representation of the minorities, the overall trend was against the continuation of communal electorates. They were seen as divisive and anti-national, a long-standing viewpoint of those who adopted the Processualist position. Yet there was also concern about ensuring that those members of the minority communities who had succeeded at the elections should be considered as the ‘real’ representatives of their respective communities. This was the issue of ‘authentic’ representation, one which had been pursued with tenacity till date by the Institutionalists. It was this very concern that sparked off a vibrant discussion on proportional representation. Those who favoured PR took an explicit Institutionalist stance when they advocated it as a method that would secure for the minorities such representatives who truly represented them. But there was opposition to PR.

Curiously, this was not framed in terms of the Processualist viewpoint but rather in terms of logistical difficulties. It was claimed that it was difficult to operate and implement in the Indian conditions. The institutional alternative to PR was the system of reserved seats. This option was preferred, indeed recommended, by the Processualists, albeit only till mid-1947, i.e. up to the point in time when the Partition of the subcontinent had not became a reality. After Partition, even reservations were ruled out for the minorities. Despite this limited support for reservations, there seems to be a consistent undercurrent of hostility to any institutional measures that would have enabled minority communities to elect representatives of their choice from amongst themselves. There seemed an unstated consensus that there should be no method or arrangement or set of rules that would allow organised minorities to vote en bloc and determine only by themselves who would represent them. Hence even proposals that for candidates to be elected from seats reserved for a given minority community they would have to secure a minimum stipulated percentage of votes from that community were rejected. It seems that the underlying notion was that the majority play a decisive role in deciding who the representatives from the minority communities would be. The spectre of communal electorates and the separatism that it had engendered, particularly in the case of the Muslims which in turn led to the division of British India on religious lines, had clearly cast a long shadow on the debate of the structure of the electoral system. This hostile attitude significantly contributed to the final outcome of the process of constructing an electoral system for a country on the threshold of independence.

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