3 minutes reading time
My neighbor is washing his car again. A dusty, dented Maruti that barely runs. He spends hours polishing the rust, pouring bucket after bucket of municipal water over the cracked windshield. It is a pathetic delusion, an attempt to disguise the fact that the engine is a pile of junk. He genuinely believes the shine will make it run faster.
This is exactly how the "ultra-smart" middle class views state politics. They look at the state legislatures, see the rot, and think, "Ah, what I really need is an Upper House! A Legislative Council! A house of elders to bring sanity to the chaos!" What an absolute joke. The Vidhan Parishads are not a polished finish on a functioning engine. They are an expensive, useless hood ornament glued onto a burning steamroller.
You want efficiency? Then stop paying for two restaurant menus when the kitchen only serves garbage. I see these State Legislative Councils parading around as chambers of "intellectual" review. The reality? They are nothing but taxpayer-funded parking lots for defeated politicians, party financiers, and loyal sycophants who couldn't win a direct election if their miserable lives depended on it. It’s an absolute circus.
The entire existence of these state-level upper houses is a spectacle designed to accommodate the political cartel's leftovers. They don't check power; they rubber-stamp the monopoly. They drain state resources just so a few unelected nobodies can enjoy a red beacon on their taxpayer-funded cars and a fat, unearned pension.
The solution is brutal and simple: State-Level Unicameralism. Scrap the upper houses entirely. Burn the secondary menus. I have no interest in funding a second chamber of appointed stooges pretending to be wise. What I demand is a unified Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) system in a single legislative assembly.
Here is how the new machinery should work. One house. Half the seats go to local representatives elected directly from constituencies—use STV or even FPTP if you must, just to appease the local egos. But the other half? Those are top-up seats allocated strictly based on the overall percentage of votes each party receives across the state.
If a party convinces 30% of the state to vote for their symbol, they get exactly 30% of the total assembly seats. Not a single seat more. If their local candidates only won 10% of the constituency races, the MMP system forces the machine to top them up with another 20% from a party list to make it fair.
This single-house MMP model destroys the FPTP delusion where a minority vote hands absolute dictatorial power to one party. It forces the assembly to actually reflect the bloody vote share. No more wasted votes. No more need for a fake "House of Elders" to pretend they are providing a check and balance. The balance is mathematically hardcoded into the single assembly.
If I have to keep watching people pretend that an unelected upper house will magically fix the corruption of the lower house, I might just scream. Stop polishing the rusted Maruti. Scrap the Vidhan Parishads. Rip out the dual-chamber nonsense. One state, one house, one proportional mandate. Anything else is just a racket.