Against communalism of the best-loser system - Lalit Mauritius

Piecemeal Constitutional Amendments a-go-go
The thorny provisions for communal classification and the best loser nomination exercise has
caused the Supreme Court to have to be called in to decide what to do on numerous occasions.
The firs time was in 1982 after the first 60-0. The shoddy drafting of the First Schedule meant
that it did not cater for a 60-0 situation. So, after the Supreme Court had sorted out the 1982
nominations, the government brought the first important Constitutional Amendments to the First
Schedule. Then in 1991, we found that neither the First Schedule nor the Supreme Court
judgement of 1982 nor the 1982 amendments had catered for the particular 57-3 situation we
had got. The Supreme Court was again called upon. Further amendments again had to be made.
Even then the judges remarked that “the question also arises as to whether now in the years to
come” the best loser clause “could be properly implemented”. Now, in 2000, once again we see
the spectacle of the poor Electoral Supervisory Commission unable to name or to decide not to
name some of the communally classified best losers. Neither the Schedule, the Supreme Court
judgements nor the two sets of amendments, catered for the 54-6 situation either.
Talk about the law making an ass of itself.
And not just any law: the Constitution itself, humiliated, again and again, by this wicked
Schedule.
Lalit’s proposal for electoral reform: Keep the best loser, but remove the
communal classification from it
Lalit has a very simple proposal. It goes in the sense of history.
Keep the Best Loser seats. On the contrary increase the number slightly. But remove all
question as to “community” from the nominations.
We proposee 63 elected members (first past the post), 3 per 21 constituencies, and then 12
nominations to be made by the Electoral Supervisory Commission on a strict “party score”
basis, taking the names of unelected candidates, in an order pre-determined by the Party leaders
from a list of 12 candidates from amongst those already standing for election and submitted to
the Electoral Commissioner on Nomination Day, as priority “best loser nominations”. [This
should be done regardless of their individual score, and be considered as a party list
nomination.If ever all these 12 are already elected (or elected and nominated) and the party is
still “under-represented” in the National Assembly, then the ESC should nominated the next
unelected candidate with the highest score from that party, using the form of computation
already used in the existing law.]
The Best Loser system would thus be converted into an instrument with which to correct (after
counting) for the under-representation of parties in terms of number of seats won relative to the
number of votes cast for the party on an over-all national level.
This proposal means a dose of proportional representation by party. It also means that parties
can put any order they choose in their lists of 12 top priority for nomination as Best Loser. This
way any “balance” a party may want to make sure of – sex, rural-urban, community, class, party
leaders, strong candidates placed in difficult-to-win constituencies – can be catered for. But the
state will no longer classify people, nor do parties have any need to.
And the 1972 Census figures for so-called “community” need never be used again for
elections, nor would candidates have to classify themselves, nor would the Electoral
Supervisory Commission find itself unable to fulfill its Constitutional role every time
there’s an election, nor would the Supreme Court have to go through the degrading
procedure of re-classifying individual citizens.