What's The New Indian Express's Agenda

I’ve become very suspicious of the media. I see agenda where, perhaps, none exists.

The New Indian Express’s editorial coverage of the recent Bihar elections appears suspect to me. After the initial accolades showered on Nitish Kumar for his victory in Bihar, this paper has been systematically trying to discredit him. A week back the editorial made a serious effort to dampen the public enthusiasm over the verdict of the people of Bihar in support of the better law and order situation, and the development that Nitish Kumar brought to the state. The newspaper made an editorial issue of the increase in the criminlisation of politics under him, the number of elected candidates with criminal background being the indicator. Today’s editorial points out how the total number of voted earned by the Nitish BJP coalition is terribly disproportionate to the seats they got. See this:

With less than 40 per cent of the vote, they took all but a fifth of the seats. Put another way , more than five in every 10 Biharis voted against, not for, the "massive mandate" winners. Nitish Kumar deserved another term, we believe; we feel even more strongly on the need to junk this grossly unfair system of voting for one guaranteeing proportional representation (PR).

Well, this is our electoral system. And the NIE wants to “junk” it now and revamp it!?! Strong demand, considering this has been our electoral system ever since independence. Why bring it up now? The discrepancy( if we can call it that) in the number of seats vis a vis the number of votes have always been mentioned by psephologists, media and the looser parties. But why is the NIE making an editorial song and dance of it NOW?

Does the paper have a pro-Congress agenda? Can anyone enlighten me on this?

I guess i have a wicked mind. Can't help wondering if the Congress and Lalu are shelling out to the paper. These days, one hears all sorts of things about the media and paid reporting.

The article:

We, like so many others in Bihar and else where, welcome the outcome of the assembly polls in that state. Yet, we'd like to apply a dampener to the torrent of words on the decisive mandate for development, change, et. al. For, this neat explanation owes itself not to the voters' choice but to the immense distortion of our firstpast-the-post (FPTP) system of voting. The landslide victory in Bihar for the incumbent coalition rests on no more than a three per cent improvement over what they polled in 2005.

With less than 40 per cent of the vote, they took all but a fifth of the seats. Put another way , more than five in every 10 Biharis voted against, not for, the "massive mandate" winners. Nitish Kumar deserved another term, we believe; we feel even more strongly on the need to junk this grossly unfair system of voting for one guaranteeing proportional representation (PR).

Take any election in India and you'll see this mangling of the voters' message. In the last assembly polls in Tamil Nadu, for instance, the AIADMK polled more than the DMK and got 35 seats less. The Congress and the DMDK both got 8.4 per cent of the total vote; the former got 34 seats and the latter, 1! In 2004, Rajasekhara Reddy became chief minister of Andhra when his party won a landslide majority over the ruling Telugu Desam; their respective percentage vote tallies were 38.6 and 37.6. This is nonsensical. It distorts our reading of history and our people. And, it leads to grotesque contortions in our polity , forcing political parties into artificial alliances to get into power or to keep it. On the other side, it breeds immense cynicism, for the individual vote does not count. In PR, by definition, every vote counts, equally. The criticism of PR is that it leads to instability: space at this point precludes us for refuting this.

Most of Europe has used it for close to a century, as have others for several decades, without any problem on stable governance. This apart, the aim of balloting is fair representation of voter views. All else is secondary .

FPTP can't do this even if there were only two parties contesting against each other. Nor can a system like the French one, where every seat has to be won by a majority; its distortions of voter mandate are as bad. Only a PR system does not.