Should India reform its electoral system?

India uses First-Past-the-Post (FPTP): the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins, regardless of whether they cross 50%. In a splintered multi-party system, this routinely produces parliamentary majorities built on 35–40% of the national vote. In 2024, the BJP won 240 seats (44% of seats) with about 36% of votes; in 2019, it won 303 seats with 37%. Critics call this a democratic distortion; defenders say FPTP produces stable governments and local accountability.

India inherited FPTP from the British Westminster model and has retained it through 18 general elections. Proportional representation (PR) was considered but rejected by the Constituent Assembly, which prioritised local constituency links and feared PR would entrench caste and community voting along list-party lines. Various Law Commission reports have flagged the disproportionality issue without producing reform.

Smaller parties consistently win far fewer seats than their vote share warrants; in 2019 the Congress won 52 seats (9.5%) with 19.5% of votes. This creates a recurring argument for reform, but those who benefit from the current system (currently large parties) have little incentive to change it.

• Parliaments should reflect how the country actually voted: a party winning 37% should not get disproportionate power over 100% of governance.
• PR systems tend to produce coalition governments that represent a broader range of voter preferences.
• FPTP wastes millions of votes: those cast for losing candidates have no representation.

• FPTP creates a direct link between MP and constituency; voters know who to hold accountable.
• PR typically produces coalition instability: Italy's proportional system produced 68 governments in 76 years.
• India's caste-community composition means PR list voting could harden group identities rather than require cross-community appeals.

The UK and Canada retain FPTP and face the same disproportionality critique. Germany uses a mixed-member proportional system where half the MPs are constituency winners and half come from proportional lists, a hybrid that retains local links while correcting for seat-vote distortion. New Zealand switched from FPTP to mixed-member PR in 1996. The German model is most commonly proposed for India by electoral reformers.

Electoral reform is technically debated but politically inert: the parties in power always won under the existing system and have no incentive to change it. The debate becomes livelier around delimitation of Lok Sabha seats, where southern states that have controlled population growth fear they will lose seats to more populous northern states, an argument for compensating them through different mechanisms.

Electoral reform maps primarily onto the Authority axis (concentrated vs distributed power) and the Nation axis (centralised vs pluralist representation). It also implies positions on how political parties should organise, a federalism question in disguise.