)
The Maharashtra Chief Minister, Prithviraj Chavan, came up with startling idea a few days ago. Regional parties, he told journalists from the Indian Express, should be barred from contesting seats to the Lok Sabha. He justified this by saying this was how it was in Germany.
So out-of-the-park is the idea that it has been ignored by everyone, at least till this morning. But who knows, some TV channel on the lookout for TRPs may initiate a debate on it today. If that happens, the participants may like to keep three things in mind.
First, the term regional party is used for describing a political party that is confined to one state. But such parties now account for around half the seats in the Lok Sabha. This proportion may not increase but will not decline either. If they are banned who will take their place? “National” parties that are confined to more than one state but fewer than 15 states?
Second, as pointed out more than a decade ago by Dr Kripa Sridharan, a deeply intellectual political scientist who used to teach at the National University of Singapore, the roles of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha have got inverted. She says that after 1996, thanks to the pre-eminence of regional parties in the Lok Sabha, for all practical purposes it is the lower House that represents states' interests. The Rajya Sabha, meanwhile, which was meant to be the House of the States now houses a large number of MPs who should be in the Lok Sabha but cannot win elections. But many of the most gifted MPs come from it because they are from national parties which do not have presence in more than half the states.
Therefore, third, in terms of the interests they represent, even the so-called national parties are now essentially regional. The BJP does not exist either in the South or the East which send around a third of the 544 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The Congress exists only in name in more than half the states.
One problem that needs to be noted is the definition of "national" used in the electoral context. A party needs to win only 5 per cent of the total votes polled to become national, regardless of the distribution of those votes. Hence the CPM is a "national" party even though it is concentrated in just two and a half states. This, surely, is nonsense.
Truth be told, India has reverted to the old mansabdari system of system of governance with the difference that it has now become contestable.
