http://www.indianexpress.com/story/32092._.html
An extract of Arun Shourie's new book on how to improve governance in India. He is essentially arguing for India to adopt a US -Presidential model, but based on the French electoral process. It does make a compelling case - needing to cross the 50% mark will ensure that everyone is perpetually bound to do a "Mayawati-2007" in every Presidential election i.e. build rainbow coalitions and instead of fragmenting the electorate into multiple pieces - fragment it into only two pieces.
Most importantly - this will completely blunt the Islamist ploy of tactical negative voting against the BJP/NDA.
How Indian politicians will defeat this model is fairly obvious. They will have one impeachment motion every week in the legislature; this because every puny politician in India really does think that he could be the next elected President. In fact this is quite true for even non-politicians such as Subramanian Swamy.
However, the book seems to be more than just about the arithmetic as is obvious from Ashok Malik's review of it in the Pioneer
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=ASHOK79%2Etxt&writer=ASHOK&validit=yes
4 comments:
Yes, I'd been thinking about this for sometime, ever since I'd seen the Israelis suggest it. So far, I think it's been the Russians who've brought this to fruition, which is why Yeltsin and later his successor Putin have been able to wield so much power. I think it would yield better results for Indian democracy, as contrasted with the current fractiousness.
There is one grave problem with such centralised power: What if the electorate gives Sonia or Arjun Singh a landslide?
We'd become the islamic/catholic republic of india in 6 weeks!
I doubt if a Sonia Gandhi or Arjun Singh can win more than half the vote of the electorate.
Remember, under this scheme votes - and not parliamentary seats - are transferable. When evaluating this we must set aside the hprse trading model of Indian democracy - thought it is hard to do so.
For all the silly opinion polls that come out the arses of the India Press; I doubt if over half the public would actually vote for Sonia. Of course, if it happened we would go down the toilet pretty quickly
GW,
Never under-estimate the stupidity of Indian voter.
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