Why did India adopt the FPTP system?

If PR distributes seats so much more precisely in proportion to votes, why did India's Constitution-makers choose FPTP for its main elections instead? The textbook gives several deliberate reasons, not an accident of drafting.

Simplicity. FPTP is easy for every voter to understand, however little formal education or specialised knowledge of politics they have — you simply mark your one preferred choice. There is no ranking, no quota arithmetic, no seat-allocation formula for an ordinary voter to follow.

A clear, accountable choice. FPTP lets a voter choose a specific candidate, not just a party list — so every constituency has one identifiable representative that voters know to hold personally accountable. Under PR, where legislators are elected off a party's list, there is often no single representative tied to one locality, and no one person a voter in that area can point to as "their" MP or MLA.

Stable government. India's parliamentary system requires the executive to command a majority in the legislature (a system studied in the next chapter). PR tends to split seats closely along vote shares, which makes clear majorities harder to produce; FPTP, by contrast, usually hands the largest party or alliance a "bonus" — a seat share noticeably larger than its vote share — which makes it easier to form a stable, functioning government. The 1984 election above is an extreme example of exactly this bonus effect.

Discouraging narrowly sectional parties. In a country as socially diverse as India, a PR system built around a single nationwide constituency could tempt every community to organise its own dedicated nationwide party, since even a small vote share nationally would still translate into seats. FPTP instead pushes candidates and parties in each constituency to build broader coalitions across social groups locally, since only the single most-voted candidate wins there.

In practice, this is roughly what has happened. FPTP has generally produced simple, stable government at the Centre and in the States, discouraged strictly single-caste or single-community parties, and — notably — India's own party system has still evolved from one-dominant-party politics after Independence, through a period of multiple smaller parties, to today's multi-party coalitions since 1989, showing that FPTP has not actually shut out new or smaller parties the way a strict two-party outcome elsewhere might suggest. …