By Bipin Sebastian
Democratic theorists, especially in the current scenario in the US, stress on political equality (one vote, one value) and majority rule as non-negotiable for democracy. However, the recent push to recalibrate and increase the number of seats in Indian parliament to more accurately reflect the latest population numbers, while a step towards political equality, would have ended up accomplishing quite the opposite. By giving further fillip to Hindu majoritarian domination, it will have only led to the entrenching of undemocratic configurations dominating the Indian state. In this scenario, I question the tenability of majority rule through elections based on universal adult franchise and ‘one vote, one value’ as a universal procedural blueprint for democracies in the face of ethno-religious majoritarianism, where the elite has become the majority and the non-elite, the minority. At the same time, it is impossible to ethically reason inequality between voters, even if it is ostensibly to counter majoritarianism. Perhaps, looking to means other than elections to decide collective self-rule is the only option left before us.
The U.S. Constitution enshrines a representative system where electoral majority as the determinant of who shall rule was tempered with the Senate and the Electoral College (for electing presidents), thereby boosting the power of the small states, while downsizing that of the larger states and their voters. However, unlike in the past, the last few decades have seen the American population geography being sorted along ideological lines. Liberals move increasingly to metropolitan cities that happen to be mostly in the big states, whereas conservatives dominate the smaller cities and the rural areas, effectively dominating the smaller states. This urban-rural segregation of the populace along partisan lines has come to mean that popular votes often are not in alignment with the Electoral College votes that decides the presidency. Republicans consistently take the smaller states such as Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, while Democrats regularly win the bigger states such as California, New York, and Illinois. As a result of disproportionate power enjoyed by voters of the smaller states, Republicans have been able to win the presidency, despite Democrats winning the majority of the popular vote, as in the cases of George W. Bush Jr in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. The constitutional privileging of the smaller states also extends to the Republican domination of the Congress and Supreme Court. The American system that uses states as an entity to refract citizen votes has inherently worked against electoral majorities and the principle of political equality (“one person, one vote, one value”).
This is a problem of “excessive counter-majoritarianism,” says Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They agree that certain domains, such as minority rights, should indeed be protected from interference by unfettered majority power. But the sanctity of electoral majorities when it comes to who should rule is non-negotiable. “Democracy is more than majority rule, but without majority rule there is no democracy,” they state categorically. Moreover, it is people, and not territories and states, that must be given representation. According to them, the constitutional system in the US has brought forth a “tyranny of the minority.”
By systematically sidelining electoral majorities that are in support of liberalism and multiracialism, the outdated system is facilitating a conservative minority-led democratic backsliding in the country. However, the scenario in the US is contrary to that of India and, as the world’s two most prominent democratic systems, calls for comparative assessment.
The Narendra Modi-led Indian government’s recent attempt to enact a constitution amendment (131st) that would have seen an increase in the size of the lower house of Indian parliament (Lok Sabha) was defeated by a determined opposition. The proposed 50% increase in the number of seats based on the latest available population numbers (Census of India 2011) would have meant a massive surge in the proportionate share of representatives from northern India.
The country’s diverging fertility rates has led to a situation where members of the Lok Sabha from the poorer northern states represent a lot more people than do their counterparts from the south, “diluting the political voice of northern voters.”
If delimitation is done on the basis of 2011 census numbers, Uttar Pradesh in the north will see their seat count in the Lok Sabha go up from 80 to 132, whereas Kerala’s in the south will only increase from 20 to 23.
However, the Opposition accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with their core vote-base coming from the Hindi-Hindu heartland states of the north, of trying to shore up a permanent majority through the move. An increase on these lines would even make the two-third majority required for constitution amendments within easy reach for Hindu majoritarian forces.
To use a broad-brush comparison, the Hindi heartland states of the north are the Indian version of the American Deep South, but with a much higher share of the country’s population.
Unlike northern India, the political culture of the southern states has by and large resisted electoral dominance by BJP, except for Karnataka where they have formed government in the past. The south has been the most important counter-majoritarian force in the country, in the face of more than a decade of BJP domination of the Indian federal state.
Opposition argues that the delimitation move is akin to punishing the states in the south that were successful in controlling their population growth rates, which was a major emphasis of the Indian government in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The proposed delimitation is in line with Article 82 of the Indian Constitution that mandates periodical recalibration of the number of seats based on the latest census and population numbers. The number of seats in the Lok Sabha was 500 when the Indian constitution came into effect in 1950. By 1973, it had reached 543 and has remained so ever since. Constitution amendments were brought in twice in the last half a century to override the constitutional requirement of delimitations such that it is currently postponed until the first census after 2026.
The rationale behind the two constitution amendments was that such an exercise would end up punishing the states in the south that were successful in controlling their population growth rates and thus disturb the federal balance.
Although stalled for now, the delimitation exercise remains a real possibility in the foreseeable future. If political equality, or the basic principle of equal weightage for all citizen votes in a democracy is to be upheld, Modi government’s push to increase the number of seats from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in the north is in the right direction. However, in effect, the move will mean a deeper and enduring entrenchment of Hindu majoritarian domination of the Indian state by drastically diminishing the south’s relative strength in the parliament further. The counter-majoritarian efficacy of the southern states in resisting Hindu nationalist domination will diminish further. This comes as delimitation exercises has already attempted alleged gerrymandering of constituencies in favor of BJP, a phenomenon alien to Indian electoral politics so far. Added to this is the ongoing Special Intensive Revision aimed at ‘purifying’ the electoral roll of non-citizens that has resulted in serious questions about willful exclusion of Muslim and other minority voters. As such, the current move to recalibrate and increase Lok Sabha seats has to be seen in the larger context of the undemocratic efforts to shore up a permanent majority for the ruling BJP.
Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, notes in an op-ed piece, “it goes without saying that any delimitation involving an increase in the strength of the Lok Sabha must be politically—and not just arithmetically —equitable.” She does not explain what would amount to political equity in this context and how it would be operationalized. Further, are the two—political and numerical equity—separate possibilities when it comes to collectively deciding who should rule through elections? Member of Parliament, Shashi Tharoor, while opposing the constitution amendment bill, came up with another suggestion in the Lok Sabha: “in a complex union, the principle of one person, one vote, one value which has been cited by the ruling party must be balanced with the principle of one state, one equal partner, one value in a country like ours.” Notably, he points to the US system as discussed above, as a legitimate model that India may also borrow from.
These reactions from the Opposition also point to the difficulty in ethically rationalizing the sidestepping of electoral equality if delimitation is carried out to better reflect the latest population numbers.
The US scenario contrasts with the Indian case and brings us back to the conundrum about numbers in a democratic system, especially since both countries are faced with a resurgent ethno-religious nationalism. In the US, there are calls for votes to be given equal value and electoral majorities to be respected if multicultural democracy has to be protected. On the other hand, giving popular votes equal weightage would mean a deepening of ethno-religious majoritarianism in the Indian context. In the former case, equal value to voter numbers and its aggregate is apparently mitigatory, whereas in the latter, it is compounding.
Hence, formal political equality (‘one vote, one value’) need not necessarily and universally imply democracy in effect, especially when the polity is divided along ethno-religious lines. As the divergences between the US and Indian cases show, it is historically and politically contingent.
This dissonance emanates from the fact that ethno-religious majoritarianism lies outside the premises within which democratic logic and practices, focused on the hierarchy between the minority elite and the majority nonelite, evolved. Ethno-religious majoritarianism turns this on its head by pitting the majority (national) elite against the minority nonelite. As such, when it comes to the latter, there is no safety or legitimacy that numbers bring with it. There is security in numbers only when the adversary is smaller than you. In polities divided along ethno-religious majority-minority lines, elections are not a disinterested and neutral procedure aberrantly leading to majoritarian rule. It, by design, authorizes and activates majoritarian capture of the state. Not surprisingly, oppressed minorities in many cases globally have nostalgic recollections about the colonial or authoritarian predecessors to democratic nation-states where they presumably led better lives.
How do we reconcile our ethical and pragmatic concerns in the face of the cold realism resulting from the winter that democracies such as India find themselves in? Waiting and hoping for the electoral pendulum to eventually swing back (if at all it does), and not swing again, may not be an effective strategy as ethno-religious minorities who are regularly called upon to pay the price in many such countries would testify.
Even though pragmatics may necessitate compromises in the pursuit of ‘counter-majoritarianism’, we cannot morally rationalize the sidestepping of political equality between citizen voters at least when it comes to deciding who gets to rule.
Perhaps, the only moral and viable option is to think beyond elections, a line of inquiry that some are already pursuing including methods for sortition such as lottery to ensure that democratic procedures, by design, do not lead to non-democratic outcomes, particularly in societies where ethno-religious differences has been politicized.
Bipin Sebastian is a PhD candidate with the Rhetoric and Public Culture program at Northwestern University, USA. His doctoral project is a comparative examination of the conditions, limitations, and possibilities of minoritarian politics within postcolonial democracies witnessing a resurgence of ethno-religious majoritarianism.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
