Insight: Compulsory Voting, A Debate Rekindled?

Only a couple of weeks ago, the Gujarat Local Authorities Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2009 gained the Governor’s assent and was passed as a law in the state.

Recently, two MP’s from the BJP, Varun Gandhi and Jandardhan Singh introduced identical private member bills titled Compulsory Voting Bill, 2014.

To set the record straight, no private member bill has been passed since 1970 and they are “trial balloons floated to elicit public response”, says Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde. “They are rarely brought to house for debating and passed as forms of legislation”, he explains. 


While details of the Bill are not public, it now has a precedent in the state of Gujarat which was recognized as the “first” state by the media to embrace compulsory voting. 

Debates on the issue have been on in full swing and former Chief Election Commissioner T.S. Krishnamurthy exercises caution. “At the moment it is not the right time”, he told the News Minute. 

Further adding, he said. “We don’t know about the government’s intentions but right now it’s too early for parliamentary constituencies and state legislatures to have compulsory voting”. 

Is compulsory voting necessary
There have been arguments for and against the subject. Supporting the idea are claims that it will strengthen the democracy and ensure political participation from everyone. 

The flipside to this argument is that forcing someone to cast a vote violates the basic right of the individual choosing to or not to vote. According to Hegde it’s not much a debate at all who says that “You cannot force people to turn up at an election, it’s not democratic”. 

“In any event, a democracy based on any sort of compulsion is no democracy at all”, he adds while saying that it will also “affect the poor adversely”. 

This is also not the first time a bill of this kind has been introduced in the Parliament. Bachi Singh Rawat and J.P. Agarwal as MP’s had both proposed the idea as private member bills it in 2004 and 2009 respectively. 

Its implementation in Gujarat makes the issue pertinent. First introduced when Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of the state, the Prime Minister is an advocate of the idea as he has stated in interviews in the past. 

Only due to Kamla Beniwal, the now former governor of the state, was the Bill stalled for five years.

Is it the right idea? The idiomatic jury is still out on this one.