The pro-government economist and psephologist like Surjit Bhalla and his ilk would have us believe that Indian elections are increasingly becoming presidential. Leadership, according to them, is a big thing. Unlike before 2014, the elections are now based on merit. Besides, the Opposition does not have a face; in fact, it has 50 faces. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the one face of the BJP, which is why he is the frontrunner and winner. That is the reason BJP will do well.
The Opposition parties huddled under the INDIA alliance debunk this argument as too jejune. They believe that the general elections in part are an aggregation of state elections, where national issues that impinge on the life of the common man also come into play. As for Modi, he is what some political scientists call India’s first Prime Minister-President, a new hybrid political creature with shades of autocracy. He is in a ‘permanent election’ mode, and has tried to convert 543 Lok Sabha constituencies into one national constituency. Though the original design of our parliamentary system remains intact, the nature of prime ministerial politics has changed beyond recognition. Democracies are a unique architecture of ‘separated institutions sharing powers’, which has now been eroded.
As for Modi, he wants to rise above the cacophony of legislative debates. In a typical presidential style, he prefers to talk outside Parliament through his monthly Mann Ki Baat radio shows. The Presidential system is visible in other areas of governance and governmentality too. The induction of retired bureaucrats in the cabinet is another instance of a trend of Modi’s growing reliance on professionals and experts.
One can debate Bhalla’s thesis endlessly, though its corollary makes more sense. Conventional wisdom suggests that PMs rule with legislative authority and Presidents govern with executive orders. Unlike the first among equals in the Westminster system, there are no equals in the Presidential system. This vests in the President immense powers to lead (or mislead) the nation. Thus, Presidential mode of governance offers an interesting option. No guessing why strong, powerful and charismatic presidents are more popular than prime ministers. This comparison with Parliamentary democracy in India has exercised the minds of some of our cerebral MPs like Shashi Tharoor, who recently batted for the Presidential form of governance in India.
But, for a presidential system to fully and truly happen, the entire architecture of elections will have to change. In the US Presidential system, eligible voters, on election day, don’t select the President directly. They are voting for 538 electors instead, who meet in their respective states and vote for President and Vice-President. The number is 538, as there are 100 senators (two per state) and 438 representatives (distributed by population). These electors comprise the Electoral College. Each state, no matter how populous, gets at least three electors, and the remaining are in proportion to the population of the state. In a sense, on election day, voters are telling their states how they want it to use its electoral votes, and the electors vote for the president on behalf of the people in their state.
To win the presidency, 270 electoral votes are needed to get a majority of the Electoral College. The number of electors cannot change without a constitutional amendment, but electors allocated to each state can change every 10 years. In the electoral college system, the candidate with the highest number of votes in a state claims all of the state’s electoral votes. For example, Donald Trump claimed all 29 electoral votes of Florida, winning the election over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 2.2 per cent. Some called the electoral college a ‘winner-takes-all’ system, as small margins in the key states with large populations (and thus more electors) can tilt the US elections in one party’s favour. This concept of ‘swing states’ will be something Democratic candidate Joe Biden will have to face in the upcoming election, knowing that Donald Trump used this very system to clinch victory.
In India, it is a first-by-the-post electoral system. For each constituency, the electors can cast their vote for a single candidate (of their choice), the winner being the candidate who gets the most votes. The country has been divided into 543 Parliamentary Constituencies, each of which returns one MP to the Lok Sabha. The twenty-nine states and two of the seven Union Territories have their own assemblies (Vidhan Sabhas) which add up to 4,120 constituencies.
Can India adapt the US system to have a truly Presidential framework? Unlikely. We have to make do with PM-President creature.