While campaigning in Puducherry for the upcoming assembly election, the Dalit Panthers party (VCK) chief Thirumavalavan did something unprecedented in India's political history - he asked voters to not vote for his party's candidates and vote for the Congress candidate instead.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, the same Thirumavalavan had filed his nomination for the Kattumannarkoil assembly and just days later, withdrew and fielded a current Congress leader in that town on a VCK ticket.
No, these were not some 'Chanakyan' barter arrangements between the Congress and VCK to befuddle the opposition. It is an outcome of the mind-boggling complexity of pre-poll alliances between political parties. And this is merely one corner of India's electoral alliance circus.
Recall, in Maharashtra in 2019, the Shiv Sena contested and won the assembly election in a pre-poll alliance with the BJP, but after a squabble over chief ministership, crossed over to form a coalition government with the rival Congress-NCP alliance. It's the exact opposite in Tamil Nadu where the DMK fights elections as the head of an alliance of a dozen parties, garnering their votes, but once in power, governs alone, excluding its allies - leaving them unsure whether they belong to the treasury benches or the opposition. In Kerala, the Congress alleges that the Communist parties are in cahoots with the BJP while the Communists claim that Congress is in truck with the BJP, when both the Congress and the Communists are together in parliament against the BJP. Head-spinningly irrational.
In a country that still uses symbols for political parties to help illiterate voters, the Tamil voter has to wade through a bewildering array of combinations of eight different symbols representing the DMK alliance and six for the AIADMK alliance. The same party, MDMK, will contest on two different symbols - one under the DMK banner and the other on its own. This acrobatic dance of electoral alliances is not just laughable. It is a mockery of the fundamental idea of democratic elections - the right of people to choose who they want and reject who they don't.
The root cause is India's first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting method. Under FPTP, a voter can choose only one candidate. Since the voter's choice is restricted to just one, political parties are incentivised to either capture that vote for themselves or be forced into an alliance with whichever party is likely to get it.
FPTP works well for two-party contests. But India has 66 recognised political parties. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, 743 parties fielded candidates. FPTP forces this bewildering diversity into a binary straitjacket: one vote, one candidate, and a prayer that the arithmetic of alliance managers aligns with your intent. It never does.
India politics' response to this distortion has been the idea of a pre-election alliance - an elaborate contraption of backroom negotiations, caste arithmetic, and seat-sharing strategies, all designed to prevent votes from "splitting." But the cure is worse than the disease.
There is a better way. It is called approval voting.
A Tamil voter today has a choice of eight major parties - DMK, AIADMK, Congress, BJP, DMDK, PMK, VCK, TVK - and several smaller ones. Suppose she approves of AIADMK, TVK, Congress and VCK, but disapproves of BJP and PMK. FPTP does not allow her to express this preference. Instead, it forces an unnatural pre-poll alliance of some of these parties, often against their own wishes. Under approval voting, she simply ticks all the parties she 'approves' of - AIADMK, TVK, Congress and VCK - instead of being forced to choose just one. She does not rank her choices like in a ranked-choice system; she merely ticks every party she approves of. The ballot, EVM and the election process remain exactly the same. The only difference: instead of pressing one button, the voter presses as many as she likes. The candidate with the most approvals wins.
Think of the idea of approval voting as MOTA - Many of the Above - the mirror image of the idea of NOTA (None of the Above). Under MOTA, the pre-poll alliance forcibly stitched by political parties becomes unnecessary. Instead, the voter stitches an alliance indirectly by choosing all the parties she approves and not choosing the ones she disapproves of. The party/candidate with the broadest acceptability emerges as the winner.
In their landmark 1978 paper in the American Political Science Review, political scientists Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn proved that approval voting is the sincerest form and obviates electoral arithmetic machinations by political parties through opportunistic alliances. Crucially, they proved it is the only such system that guarantees a 'Condorcet' winner - the candidate who would beat every other in a head-to-head contest - when one exists.
The United Nations uses approval voting to elect its Secretary-General. Forms of it were used in Ancient Greece, Medieval Venice, and for papal conclaves from the 13th to 17th centuries. The cities of Fargo and St. Louis in America have adopted it in recent years.
Won't MOTA leave Indian voters confused? No. It is far simpler for a voter to tick all the parties she approves of than to be forced to remember which party is in alliance with which and vote accordingly, regardless of whether she approves of that alliance or not.
Won't this hurt smaller parties? On the contrary. Under approval voting, every party can contest in all constituencies, if it wishes, without being forced into an alliance. In the above Tamil Nadu example, a voter can then approve VCK and Congress and DMK without the embarrassing need for VCK chief to ask voters to not vote for his own candidate. Small parties gain a genuine measure of their support without being forced into humiliating dependence on larger allies for seat allocations.
India's political diversity is not a bug. It is a faithful reflection of the most heterogeneous society on Earth. The answer is not to force-fit this diversity into artificial, volatile and dishonest two-bloc alliances through FPTP. The answer is to let voters express their preferences honestly - approve who they like, ignore who they don't - and let the candidate whom the broadest cross-section finds acceptable, win. MOTA can end the hypocritical, opportunistic and irrational pre-poll alliance culture of India's political parties.
(Praveen Chakravarty is a senior office bearer of the Congress party and a political economist)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.
