Letters: Voting patterns

The Congress has been able to get a simple majority in the Karnataka Assembly election to form the government. Its leaders interpret it to mean that the public is not convinced of any wrongdoing on the part of the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre. A dispassionate analysis shows that the Congress is the beneficiary of the "first-past-the-post-and-winner-takes-it-all" system. If proportional representation had been in operation, the Congress would have got around 80 seats - far below the 112 required for a simple majority. Its vote share was only 36.5 per cent - less than two per cent more than what it had on the previous occasion. Second, people are by now sufficiently educated and knowledgeable enough to distinguish between different elections. The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam did not get a single seat in Tamil Nadu in the parliamentary election of 2004 and won only seven seats in 2008, but in the Assembly election of 2011 earned a good majority, thanks to all the misdemeanours of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. There are attempts to bring B S Yeddyurappa back to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the ground that his party did the damage to the BJP's chances. But the results show that his role was marginal. The results were influenced by the fragmentation of the Lingayat votes among the major parties. It would be foolish to think about bringing Yeddyurappa back into the BJP until the court cases against him are decided in his favour. People are selecting the lesser of the two evils in our polity.

A Seshan Mumbai

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