From CK Nayak
New Delhi: North Eastern states including Meghalaya might be in quandary over the July 19 Presidential polls since one of the contenders Purno A Sangma is a veteran tribal leader hailing from the region.
Going by official statistics, the vote value of all the MLAs of the eight North Eastern states put together is less than that of Uttar Pradesh due to the sparse population in the region.
Barring Assam, where vote value of each MLA is 116, the rest of the states in the region have MLA vote values in single or double digits with Sikkim having the least in the country at 7 followed by Arunachal Pradesh (8) Mizoram (8) Nagaland (9), Meghalaya (17), Manipur (18) and Tripura (26).
Assam has an Assembly of 116 seats followed by 60 each in Meghalaya, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura. Mizoram has 40 seats while Sikkim has 32.
Even a small state like Goa has a vote value of 20 which is higher than all other NE states apart from Assam.
Special category states like Jammu and Kashmir (72), Himachal Pradesh (51), Uttarakhand (64), Punjab (116) and Haryana (112) also have higher vote values than the NE states.
With 208 votes and 403 legislators, Uttar Pradesh has the highest vote in the country and more than the whole of NE put together.
“This is because the total value of votes of all the members of each state assembly is worked out by multiplying the number of elected Members in the assembly by number of votes of each member,” a constitutional expert said quoting Election Commission records.
When MPs’ votes are taken into account the region fares no better since barring Assam no other state has more than two MPs in the Lok Sabha and one in Rajya Sabha. For counting vote value of MPs, the total value of votes of elected MLAs of all the states added together is divided by the total number of elected Members of Parliament, the expert said.
This way the vote value of an MP remains same irrespective of the size of his state but the NE region loses ground since the number of MPs here is very less compared to bigger states. UP has more than 100 MPs which is nearly double of all the NE states put together.
The vote value of MPs has remained the same at 708 since the 11th Presidential polls when Shankar Dayal Sharma was elected. There is also not much change in vote value of MPs since 1977 when Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed from Assam was elected.
Leaving aside these regional calculations, the total vote value of all the NE states’ MLAs is only 19,840 compared to a staggering 5,49,474 for the whole country. It is only the big states like Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal besides UP which matters in the voting because of the sheer size of their State assemblies.
The vote value is based on the 1971 Census report pending an amendment in the Parliament and opposition by southern states which have controlled population.
Only elected Members of the Assembly, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha are eligible to vote in the presidential election.
Contrary to popular belief, election for the President is held in accordance with proportional representation by means of single transferable votes. An elector has as many preferences as there are candidates and can mark one, two or more as his preference.
In case of no candidate getting required number of votes in the first round of counting, the second preference votes of the lowest candidate is transferred to others in second round, the expert said. Such a scenario happened only once in 1969 when VV Giri was elected president and the scene is not likely to be repeated in this poll since there are only two candidates, he added.
While Purno Sangma has made an emotional appeal to the tribals to vote for him, Meghalaya Chief Minister Dr Mukul Sangma has appealed his coalition partners to vote for the UPA candidate Pranab Mukherjee. Purno’s former party, NCP, which has a sizeable presence in Meghalaya, is also in a piquant situation since voting in Presidential polls is secret.
The United Democratic Party (UDP) and the Hill State Peoples’ Democratic Party (HSPDP), which are supporting the Congress-led Meghalaya United Alliance government, have pledged their support to Purno on the ground that he is a tribal from the State.
Saying that the presidential poll has no bearing on the commitment of coalition partners in the state government, UDP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Bindo M Lanong said his party has unanimously decided to support the former Lok Sabha Speaker as a local Independent candidate. He is no more with any party after he resigned from the NCP, Lanong argued.
Earlier, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and Mizo National Front (MNF) pledged their support to PA Sangma, who is backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Biju Janata Dal, AIADMK and some other parties. But strangely the anti-Congress DAN Government in Nagaland has backed Pranab.