The mandate to rule India

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There is an interesting sub theme to the Jan Lok Pal Bill agitation led by Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption movement. Civil society activists lobbying the government for enactment of such Bills are not the people’s representatives. They have no locus standi because they do not represent us in our Parliament. They stand outside our democracy and tell our elected representatives what to do and if our elected chaps don’t agree, then they agitate, go on hunger strike, mobilize aam janta support and make the government lose heavy political capital in the bargain. When the politicians tell us that this is a subversion of parliamentary and democratic norms, they are actually right. (Never mind the fact that the aam janta that voted them also supports India Against Corruption wholeheartedly.) After all our MPs and our MLAs are duly elected by us and send as our representative to Parliament.

Politicians that are in the ruling coalition always tell you that they have the mandate to rule for a 5 year term. This is significant. It signifies that the people of India have selected their merry band of politicians to see them through another 5 years of unfulfilled promises. But do they really have the mandate to rule us? Are they really in power because of popular support?

I have been wanting to determine popular support and quantify it for a very long time. I am undertaking this exercise based on the Indian General Elections 2009 – since it was our last one. You can choose any election results (state or central) and determine popular support if you like. This is not meant to show any political party in a bad light; it is merely my attempt to quantify what the media and politicians refer to as popular support and mandate.

Here are some undisputed facts:

1. The population of India stands at 1.2 billion people. That’s 120 crore people.
2. The number of people who were eligible to vote in Indian in 2009 were 71.4 crores as per Wikipedia.
3. The average voter turnout was 59.7%; that means approximately 42.6 crore people voted. (That’s probably a bit too high than it actually is because the declared statistics are not of actual number but of the averages across each constituency of varying populace). For the sake of ease, lets assume that it is indeed 42.6 crore.
4. Indian National Congress was the single largest party and the major partner of the UPA II coalition. Their vote share in the 2009 election was 28.6%. That means out of the 42.6 crore that bothered to turn up, 28.6% of them voted for the ruling party that formed our government. That comes up t0 12.18 crore.
5. Lets assume the remaining allies of the UPA polled another 10% together, that’s another 4 crore.

So basically the votes of roughly 16 crore people out of 120 crore have ensured that the UPA rules for another 5 years.

That’s 13.34% of all citizens in India.

That’s popular vote and mandate to rule. That gives our government the license to formulate laws and govern us. If you look at NDA stats of 1999 general elections you will come up with a similar number. If you look at most state elections, you will come up with a similar number.

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