The recent (article) by Dr. Satinath Choudhary ... 'Empowering Social Minorities" (The Hindu, July 18, 2000) ... in the ongoing discussion on review of the Constitution ... Dr. Choudhary, a Dalit himself, has struck at the heart of the matter of representation and empowerment.

His argument is simple. No reservation of any kind, for women or for Dalits, whether by reservation of  constituencies or by requiring political parties to allot a proportion of their tickets, will do any good as long as it is linked to the current form of electoral system .. What is this current system? It is one in which there are territorial (geographically-based) constituencies which send only one representative, the winner of the largest number of votes, to Parliament. This is most commonly known as a first-past-the-post or FPTP system ...

The main fault of an FPTP system of single-member territorial constituencies is that minorities are systematically under-represented. For social minorities which are geographically concentrated, as some ethnic groups are, this may not be so serious. But for those minorities which are spread throughout a country, as Dalits arc in India and as African- Americans are in the U.S. (to take the two most obvious examples), the result can be devastating. They will not achieve real epresentation simply because the majority (or sizeable plurality) of white or caste- Hindu voters can, with a plurality of votes in the constituency, determine who gets elected. Minorities can be shut out in every constituency and so get almost no representation in Parliament.

Muslims in India, for example, have less than half of their proportion of the population as MPs. In the U.S. today, African- Americans, with 12 per cent of the population, have only 7 per cent of the seats in the Congress, while Latinos, who are 10 per cent of the population, have only 3 per cent. And even this is the highest proportion they have achieved in the history of the country, and has been made possible only due to gerrymandering of constituencies, something recently banned by the U.S. Supreme Court! ..

... Dalits because of reservation, have a percentage of MPs equivalent to their proportion of the population - but, as Dr. Choudhary argues, this is not a true representation because they are. in effect, chosen by an upper-caste majority dominated by very different political and social ideas than those held by the majority of Dalits themselves. As evidence he cites data showing that the BJP in the 1996 election won 40 per cent of the seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes while, as surveys have shown, only 10 per cent of Scheduled Castes actually supported them.

Electoral systems based on proportional representation solve this problem in a very simple way. They use, first of all, multi-seat constituencies (these may range from constituencies electing five to seven MPs to constituencies covering a whole country) rather than the. single-member ... constituencies. In the simplest form of PR, the Party List system, political parties put forward their list of candidates. In the Closed List version, voters can only choose the party they want; in the Open List form (which is what is advocated by Dr. Choudhary) they may vote for individual candidates and so have a say in how candidates are ranked in the party lists themselves. The Open List system is obviously more democratic. But in both versions, once the vote is in, each political party is allotted a proportion of the elected MPs according to the vote received ...

PR ... works much better than other systems in ensuring that minority social groups and minority political views - as long as these provide the motives through which people vote - get representation ....

This shutting out of minorities is what Ambedkar feared would happen to Dalits in India. From the beginning, he was certain that Dalits would not get representation in the existing FPTP system. As early as 1919, at the time of his testimony before the Southborough Committee, he posed the problem of representation ...

By the time of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution, separate electorates were thoroughly discredited and reservation within single-member constituencies was the only option considered ... The failure to consider any other alternative electoral system is remarkable..

The Constitutional Review Commission set up by the BJP Government (has) to frightened progressives or minorities. Dalits have very understandably agitated against the very idea of a review, using as their banner the emotional cry that "Ambedkar's Constitution" must not be touched.

However, emotion can be misleading. On the issue of electoral systems, PR versus FPTP, some rethinking is necessary ...

The PR electoral systems empower not only social minorities. They also help to empower political minorities, or minorities of opinion and so are supported in the U.S. by minority parties as diverse as the Greens and the Libertarian party.

It is striking that with all the discussion of democratic struggles and expanding democracy in India, almost no one has thought of debating the mechanisms of democratic representation ... To discuss proportional representation today is to discuss what may seem to be a radical Constitutional change, but one very much in the spirit of Ambedkar, who was concerned throughout his life about defeating the tyranny of the majority. (Source: The Hindu, 23 and 24 August, 2000)