Q."Indian democracy is now ready to shift from crude FPTP to Proportional Representation." Do you agree? Give reasons.

FPTP's flaws are real, but the specific reasons India adopted it in the first place still mostly hold today. …

The case for shifting to PR. The core criticism is accurate and well-documented in this chapter itself: FPTP can give a party a seat share wildly out of proportion to its vote share (Congress's 415 seats on 48% of the vote in 1984 being the clearest case), and it can shut out smaller parties almost entirely even when they collectively poll a meaningful share of votes (as seen in the Tamil Nadu 2016 result, where PMK, BJP and DMDK together polled over 10% of the vote but won zero seats). PR would fix this distortion directly.

The case against a full shift. The reasons India's Constitution-makers chose FPTP were not arbitrary, and most of them still apply. FPTP remains far simpler for a genuinely mass electorate that includes voters with very different levels of formal education — no ranking or seat-allocation arithmetic to follow. It still ties every constituency to one identifiable, locally accountable representative, which PR's party-list seats do not guarantee. It still tends to produce clearer majorities and more stable government in India's parliamentary system, where the executive must command a legislative majority — PR elsewhere (as in Israel) routinely produces fragile multi-party coalitions. And in a country as socially diverse as India, FPTP's incentive to build broad, cross-community coalitions within each constituency arguably still matters more, not less, than it did in 1950. …