7 minutes reading time
I've spent five months writing about what's broken. Slot machines and wasted votes and demographic penalties and hollow upper houses and referees on retainer. Five months of forensics on a body everyone can see is dead.
The obvious question — the one that shows up in every comment, every message from people who somehow still read this — is: fine, what would you do instead?
So. Here's what I'd do.
This isn't a manifesto. I'm not running for anything. These are notes from someone who has been staring at the mechanics long enough to see what different parts would look like. You can disagree with all of it. I'd rather someone disagree with a specific proposal than keep being angry at a vague abstraction.
The Lok Sabha goes to Mixed-Member Proportional representation. Two votes on the ballot. One for your local constituency candidate — exactly as it works now, same FPTP race, same MP who can fix the drainage outside your house. One for a party.
After the constituency seats are filled, the party vote determines what percentage of the total legislature each party deserves. The gap between what they deserve and what they won is made up from a party list. BJP wins 31% of party votes? They get 31% of seats — not 52%. Congress wins 19%? They get 19%, not 8%. BSP wins 4%? Twenty-two seats. Not zero.
I've written the mechanics of this in detail already. It works. Germany has used it since 1949. New Zealand since 1996. Neither country has collapsed into chaos. Neither requires a mathematics degree to vote.
The Rajya Sabha is the harder problem. It was designed to be the Council of States — a room where state interests are represented independently of national party lines. It became a Council of Party Debts. The fix: allocate each state's Rajya Sabha seats by the state's most recent election vote share, not by which party controls the state assembly. Tamil Nadu's seats should reflect what Tamil Nadu actually voted, across all parties — not just the party that swept the assembly on FPTP's distortions. The MLA-patron link that turns Rajya Sabha members into national party soldiers gets severed. State representatives actually represent states.
Most states have unicameral legislatures. Six states have a Vidhan Parishad — a legislative council, an upper house.
These councils are not revising chambers in any meaningful sense. They are parking lots. Defeated politicians, party financiers, loyalists who couldn't win a direct election anywhere, retired bureaucrats being owed favours. They cost money to run. They slow down legislation without meaningfully improving it. They give red beacons and pensions to people who serve no democratic function.
Scrap them.
Every state gets a single assembly operating on MMP. Half the seats from constituencies — your local representative, still there, still accountable to the road outside your gate. Half from a statewide party list that tops up the assembly until each party's seat share matches their vote share. You don't need a second chamber to provide balance when balance is mathematically built into the first one.
The immediate objection is that MMP produces coalition governments. To which I say: look at what the "stable" single-party majority has given us at the state level. Chief ministers with unchallenged control for fifteen years. Institutions captured, police forces politicised, public funds redirected to permanent electoral warfare. Instability at the margins is the point. A government that can be held to account is not a government that can do whatever it wants.
The Union List — the list of subjects the central government exclusively controls — currently runs to nearly a hundred entries. Defence. Foreign policy. Atomic energy. Currency. Banking. Railroads. Highways. Ports. Agriculture. Education. Criminal law. Civil procedure. Labour. Insurance. Corporations. Broadcasting. And so on.
This is not federalism. This is a continental empire that holds elections.
Strip the Union List down to three items: Defence, Foreign Affairs, Currency. That's it. Everything else — every road, every hospital, every school, every agricultural policy, every policing decision — goes to the State List. Completely. No "Concurrent" list where the centre can override states whenever it feels like it. No centrally-sponsored schemes with conditions attached. No prime ministers promising toilets and electricity connections from a podium in Delhi as if local governance is a Union ministry's side project.
I understand this sounds radical. It is radical. That's because the distance between where we are and where we should be is large. Incremental adjustment of a system this broken produces incremental improvement on a broken system. The problem isn't one department. It's the architecture.
When I have a problem with my drainage, the chain of accountability should go: me → local body → state government → done. Not me → local body → state government → central scheme administrator → DTCP → North Block → some bureaucrat who has never been to Coimbatore and doesn't know what a monsoon looks like from the inside of a flooding neighbourhood.
None of the above changes anything if the parties that operate within this reformed system are themselves internal autocracies.
Every major Indian political party is run by a small group of people — often one family, or one inner circle — who face no internal democratic accountability whatsoever. They issue tickets. They enforce whips. They control party lists. They decide who rises and who gets parked. The "High Command" is the correct term: it is a command structure, not a representative one.
The Election Commission supervises elections. It should supervise parties.
Any party that wants recognized status — the symbol, the airtime, the electoral rolls access — should be required to elect its own leadership through a process supervised by the Election Commission. Membership rolls audited. Leadership elections conducted with the same procedural rigour as a general election. Not "consensus" arrived at in a room where one dynasty's choice is announced as the unanimous will of the membership. An actual vote, with actual secrecy, among actual registered party members.
If a party can't run a democratic election internally, it has no business asking the electorate to trust it with running the country. That's not a philosophical point. It's a competence test.
None of this will happen.
Not because it's technically impossible. Not because voters wouldn't support it if they understood it. Because the party that has the power to legislate these reforms is the same party that benefits from the current system. Every reform I've described reduces the power of the ruling party and its national rivals. MMP cuts their seat bonus. Rajya Sabha reform breaks their upper house dominance. Decentralisation removes their central patronage levers. Internal party elections threaten every dynastic structure in the country simultaneously.
Expecting the cartel to voluntarily dismantle its own advantages is expecting a man to vote for his own pay cut. It doesn't happen from the goodness of hearts. It happens when there is enough external pressure that the cost of not reforming exceeds the cost of reforming.
New Zealand got proportional representation because the 1978 election was so obviously rigged — the party with fewer votes won the most seats — that public fury eventually forced a Citizens' Forum, an independent commission, a referendum, and a transition. The anger had to be large enough, sustained enough, and organised enough to make the political cost of defending the status quo unbearable.
India hasn't gotten there yet. The three hundred million wasted votes are invisible to most people because nobody counts them, nobody reports them, and the people who control the reporting have no interest in people becoming angry about arithmetic.
But the arithmetic doesn't care about your patience. It sits there, every election, doing the same thing, producing the same results.
I'll keep writing about it until my hands give out.