3.6 FPTP in India — Lok Sabha and State Assemblies

The Constitution of India has prescribed the First-Past-the-Post system for elections to the Lok Sabha (Article 81) and to the State Legislative Assemblies (Article 170). Three rules govern these elections:

• The country is divided into 543 Lok Sabha constituencies (each State is similarly divided into Assembly constituencies).
• Each constituency elects one representative.
• The candidate who secures the highest votes in that constituency^? is declared elected.

Note that the winning candidate need not secure a majority of votes — only more than every other candidate. If a constituency has many candidates and the votes are split, a winner could emerge with as little as 25–30% of the votes. The votes that go to all losing candidates count for nothing in seat allocation; they are sometimes called “wasted votes”.

3.7 Why Did India Adopt FPTP?

The Constitution makers had options. They could have chosen pure PR like Israel, or some hybrid like Germany. They chose FPTP. The reasons were practical, political and social.

Experience over more than seventy years has, on the whole, vindicated this choice. FPTP has helped large parties win clear majorities at the Centre and in the States. It has discouraged purely caste- or community-based parties from running national campaigns. After 1989 India also began to see multi-party coalitions, and yet new and smaller parties have been able to enter electoral competition — a useful flexibility within the FPTP framework.

3.8 Reservation of Constituencies — SC/ST Seats

FPTP has a hidden weakness in a society like India. If the dominant social group in a constituency consistently votes together, smaller and historically oppressed groups may never elect a representative — even though they form a sizeable national population. Our Constitution makers were keenly aware of the long history of caste-based discrimination, and built in a remedy.

3.8.1 The Rejected Alternative — Separate Electorates

Before independence, the British Government had introduced separate electorates for several communities. Under that system, only voters belonging to a particular community could elect a representative from that community. The Constituent Assembly debated and decisively rejected this. Tajamul Husain told the Assembly on 26 May 1949 that separate electorates had been “a curse to India” and had “barred our progress”. Indians, he said, wanted to “merge in the nation”.

3.8.2 The Chosen Solution — Reserved Constituencies

Instead, the Constitution provided for reservation of seats^? in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. The crucial difference is this:

Of the 543 elected seats in the Lok Sabha, 84 are reserved for Scheduled Castes and 47 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (as on 26 January 2019). The numbers are roughly proportional to each group’s share in India’s population. Reservation was originally provided for 10 years and has been extended through successive constitutional amendments — the latest extension is up to 2030.

3.8.3 Who Decides Which Constituency is Reserved?

This work is done by an independent body called the Delimitation Commission^?, appointed by the President of India and working in collaboration with the Election Commission. Its job is to draw the boundaries of constituencies so that populations are roughly equal.

• For Scheduled Tribes, the Commission identifies constituencies with the highest proportion of ST population.
• For Scheduled Castes, it picks constituencies with higher proportions of SC population, but spreads them across regions of the State (because SC population is generally evenly spread).
• Reserved constituencies can be rotated at each new delimitation.

The Constitution does not provide similar reservation for other disadvantaged groups in Parliament — with one important exception. After many years of debate, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women’s Reservation Act, 2023) was enacted, providing for reservation of one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabhas for women. (Reservation for women in rural and urban local bodies had already been provided much earlier — that story belongs to the chapter on Local Governments.)

3.9 Universal Adult Franchise & Right to Contest

Apart from the method of election, the Constitution answers two more fundamental questions: who can vote, and who can contest.

3.9.1 Universal Adult Franchise

One of the boldest decisions of the Constitution makers was to grant every adult Indian citizen the right to vote — regardless of caste, religion, gender, education, income or property. This is called universal adult franchise^?. In many other democracies, this right was won only after long struggles — women in the United Kingdom, for example, won full voting rights only in 1928.

Until 1989, an “adult” in India meant a citizen above the age of 21. The 61st Constitutional Amendment of 1989 reduced the voting age to 18 — bringing in tens of millions of younger voters at one stroke.

3.9.2 The Right to Contest

All citizens have the right to stand for election. The Constitution does not impose limits of education, income, class or gender. There are, however, two principal restrictions:

• Minimum age: A candidate for the Lok Sabha or State Assembly must be at least 25 years old. Higher minimum ages apply to the Rajya Sabha (30) and the offices of President and Vice-President (35).
• Disqualification: A person sentenced to imprisonment of two years or more for any offence is disqualified from contesting elections.

3.10 The Election Commission of India — Article 324

Holding clean elections in a country of India’s size requires more than rules in a Constitution — it needs an independent body to actually run the elections. Article 324 of the Constitution creates such a body: the Election Commission of India^?.

These constitutional words are very wide. They give the ECI a decisive role in virtually everything connected with elections, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld this broad reading. To assist it, every State has a Chief Electoral Officer. The ECI is, however, not responsible for the conduct of local body elections — those are run by separate State Election Commissions, each working in its own sphere.

3.10.1 Composition — Single-Member or Multi-Member?

The Constitution allows the ECI to be either single-member or multi-member. The history of the body is interesting:

• From 1950 to 1989, the ECI was a single-member body — only the Chief Election Commissioner.
• Just before the 1989 general elections, two Election Commissioners were added.
• It briefly reverted to single-member after the elections, but in 1993 two Election Commissioners were appointed again, and the body has been multi-member since.

There is now broad consensus that a multi-member ECI is preferable: power is shared, decisions are debated, and accountability is clearer. The Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) presides over the body but does not hold more powers than the other Commissioners. The CEC and the two Commissioners take all decisions collectively, with equal voting power. They are appointed by the President of India on the advice of the Council of Ministers.

3.10.2 Tenure and Removal — The Security of Independence

The Constitution carefully guards the independence of the ECI:

• The CEC and Election Commissioners are appointed for a six-year term, or until they turn 65, whichever is earlier.
• The CEC can be removed only on a recommendation of both Houses of Parliament passed by a special majority^? — the same procedure used for impeaching a Supreme Court judge.
• The two Election Commissioners can be removed by the President of India.

3.10.3 Functions of the ECI

The functions of the ECI fall into four broad clusters:

1. Electoral rolls: The Commission supervises the preparation of an up-to-date voters’ list. It works to ensure that no eligible voter is missing and no ineligible or non-existent name is on the roll.
2. Election schedule: It decides the timing of every election — the notification, last date for filing nominations, scrutiny, withdrawal, polling and counting.
3. Free and fair poll: The ECI implements the Model Code of Conduct^?; it can postpone or cancel an election in a constituency, State or even nationally if the atmosphere is “vitiated”; it can order a re-poll or a recount where it suspects unfairness.
4. Recognition and symbols: The ECI recognises political parties and allots symbols to each.

The ECI has a small permanent staff of its own. It conducts elections by drawing on the regular administrative machinery of the Centre and the States. Once the election process begins, however, the Commission gets full control over those officers in election-related matters — including the power to transfer them, stop their transfers, and take action against them for partisan behaviour. This is what makes Article 324 a powerful instrument in the right hands.

3.11 Voting Machines and the Modern Election

India’s elections have steadily modernised. Paper ballots have been replaced by Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), which are robust, battery-operated, and used across the country. EVMs make voting faster, prevent invalid ballots, and speed up counting. The VVPAT (Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) prints a small slip showing the symbol of the candidate the voter has just chosen, allowing the voter to verify their vote before it falls into a sealed box for audit.

The 2013 introduction of the NOTA^? (None Of The Above) option on EVMs gave voters another tool: a recorded way to express dissatisfaction with all candidates. NOTA does not, however, change the winner — the candidate with the most positive votes is still declared elected, irrespective of how many people pressed NOTA.