The BLD (Best Loser Delusion)

Denis Bernard Patrice LebonÂ

Why the genteel affectation of “modernising” a constitutional fossil disintegrates upon contact with serious scrutiny and institutional reality – because it merely refits an ornamental corrective while leaving the vote-to-seat engine untouched – and why theQuintette démocratiquealone seems to have the nerve, and the conceptual discipline, to confront, to tame and finally to redesign the complete arithmetic by which majorities are not merely expressed, but power itself is manufactured.

Mauritius does not lack moral vocabulary. What it lacks, what it has long lacked, is institutional intelligibility. In that spirit, I have carefully read the proposal of Mr Kelvin Suddason onLe Mauricien’snewspaper (Reimagining the BLS for a more inclusive Mauritius | Le Mauricien)Forumpage to “reimagine” the Best Loser System, less as a frivolous gesture, than as a sincere attempt to reconcile inclusion with stability. The instinct behind the piece is indeed honourable: minorities should not be submerged by arithmetic and a republic ought not to compel its citizens to perform identities that no longer correspond to their lived reality. Yet sincerity, however admirable, does not absolve anyone from rigour. If we are to alter the very fabric of representation, we must then first decide whether we are repairing a façade or redesigning a structure.

I begin by granting the most generous reading of the argument I oppose. The case is made that the Best Loser System rests upon a fossilised census base from 1972 and upon categories – Hindu, Muslim, Sino-Mauritian, General Population – whose sociological plausibility has been steadily eroded by five decades of social intermixture, mobility as well as civic maturation. It is further argued that, because a fresh census framed along communal lines would be politically incendiary, the constitutional imagination should pivot away from ethnic communities and toward contemporary socio-political minorities: women, the young, persons with disabilities, sexual minorities. In short, the proposal is to retain the corrective logic of the BLS while updating its beneficiaries.

At first glance, this appears enlightened, since it speaks the language of dignity and modernity; it gestures toward protection against the tyranny of the majority; it appeals to the intuitive sense that democracy is not merely arithmetic but justice. Nobody would dare contesting the moral impulse. What I do contest is the analytical leap. For it presupposes that the ailment resides in the categories, and not in the machinery. It presumes that if we redraw the labels on the drawers, the cabinet itself will become sound.

My difficulty with that presumption is structural. The central pathology of our electoral system is not merely that the Best Loser System rests on demographic assumptions fossilised half a century ago. The central pathology is that the prevailing majoritarian engine itself is capable, under certain