Democracy: Facts

Be it the reservation row or the Ram sethu row or the nuclear deal row, One wonders whether the policies and actions taken by the Govt. truly represents the mood and opinion of the entire country. Being the largest democracy in the world ideally it should. Here is some mathematics to show how wrong we are if we answer in affirmation to the above question.

Elections are held in constituencies where , lets say on an average 10 contestants from various different parties contest. Lets say the winner gets 30 % of the votes and is elected as a MP/MLA. Now just extrapolating this situation to all the constituencies we get a house of say 500 members each member with 30 % votes from his/her constituency. Now to form a Govt. a party needs majority that is more than 50 % members in the house which is 251 in our case. So the % fo votes for this so called majority is 251/500 X 30/100=15.06%.

Hence, the party having "majority" in a house has typically the support of only 15% of the people who have cast their votes and they in turn choose a leader of their own to run the country/state.


So what's the point? How do we solve this? I am of the belief that the leader of the Govt. say PM/CM must be chosen directly by the people and not by other members who were chosen by people. Along with the ballot box/EVM for chosing the local constituency member there should be anothet box/EVM to choose the PM/CM of their choice and this should be taken into account for choosing the PM/CM. Also, the total % of votes for a particular political party should be taken into consideration for choosing the ruling party.