The Centre has indicated that the much-delayed Census could start as early as next year. A key event that could follow is the delimitation of constituencies, a move that’s the subject of debate with the southern states saying they have much to lose in terms of their representation in Parliament.
In this context, a short-lived experiment with multi-member constituencies is a sign of how far India has travelled in terms of parliamentary representation in less than eight decades.
The idea behind multi-member constituencies — seats where more than one member would be elected — was to give representation to persons belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.
Therefore, depending on their population, it was decided that certain seats would be reserved for them. But unlike now, they would not be the only candidates on that seat. Take for instance, a constituency that we hypothetically name ‘X’. If X has a high population of SCs, it will be declared a two-member constituency and each party can field a general candidate and an SC candidate. Each voter in this constituency then has two votes. At the end of the electoral process, this seat would send two members to the Lok Sabha or the Assembly, as the case may be. In line with the first-past-the-post system, the two candidates with the maximum votes would be declared the winner.
But the concept of multi-member constituencies lasted only two elections in Independent India — 1952 and 1957.
For the first general elections of 1951-52, 72 of the 489 seats in the Lok Sabha were reserved for Scheduled Castes and 26 for the Scheduled Tribes.
Of these 72 seats reserved for SCs, 71 were two-member seats. North Bengal was the only three-member Lok Sabha constituency, where there was a general candidate and two reserved category candidates — one SC and the other ST.
Of the 26 seats reserved for the STs, 10 seats were single-member reserved constituencies and 15 were two-member constituencies, with North Bengal being a three-member constituency.
Since SCs, unlike STs, are spread across almost all areas of the states, there was no single-member SC constituency in 1952.
Of the 3,283 seats in the state Assemblies, 477 were reserved for SCs and 192 for STs. Mainaguri constituency in West Bengal was the only single-member constituency reserved for SC. Nasik-Igatpuri, in erstwhile Bombay state, was the only three-member constituency that had one general candidate and two reserved-category candidates — one SC and one ST.
Unsurprisingly, given the sheer dominance of the Congress in those days, all the three winners in the North Bengal three-member constituency in the 1952 election were party candidates — Upendra Nath Barman, Birendra Nath Katham, and Amiya Kanta Basu.
Similarly, in the three-member assembly seat in Bombay, the three winners were all Congress candidates — Bhikha Trimbak Pawar, Pandurang Mahadeo Murkute, and Dattatraya Tulshiram Kale.
Each voter in a multi-member constituency would have as many votes as there are seats in that constituency, but his votes are cumulative. To prevent cumulative voting in multi-member constituencies, for two-member constituencies, the Election Commission would print two ballot papers, each bearing the same serial number but with one bearing the suffix “A”.
Ahead of the 1957 general elections, states were reorganised based on the recommendations of the Justice Fazl Ali Commission and constituencies were redrawn by the Delimitation Commission based on the 1951 Census.
Consequently, the Lok Sabha seats went up to 494 (of the 403 constituencies, 91 had two members each) and the count of the state Assemblies went up to 3,102 seats (2,518 constituencies: 584 of them double-member). There were no three-member seats in 1957.
But the results of the 1957 election were a setback for several general category candidates, among them Congress’s V V Giri, who lost from Parvathipuram in Andhra Pradesh — both the winners were from the ST community and Giri stood third. Since it was a two-member constituency, the winner and the runner-up were declared elected.
V V Giri’s wasn’t the only such case — in as many as 20 two-member constituencies that election, both the winning members were SC or ST candidates. In nine single-member general constituencies, too, the winners were SC or ST candidates. That would prove to be the turning point for the concept of multi-member seats.
Though Giri was appointed Governor of UP three months later, in June 1957, the loss rankled. He challenged the election of the second ST candidate, Dippala Suri Dora, before the then ‘Election Tribunal’, which upheld Dora’s election. Giri then appealed to the Andhra Pradesh High Court and later, the Supreme Court. On May 20, 1959, a bench of five judges upheld the High Court’s decision, saying that in a two-member constituency, ST candidates (in this case) were free to contest not only the reserved seat but also the general seat.
Following the verdict, the government decided to amend the Constitution to do away with the system of two-member constituencies.
