Separate electorate

In India, a certain number of political positions and university posts are held for specific groups of the population, including Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Backward Castes, Anglo-Indians and Women.

There are reserved constituencies in both Parliamentary and State Assembly elections. Candidates of General category are not eligible to contest from these constituencies. All voters are to vote for one of the candidates (from Scheduled Castes or Schedule Tribes). In case of Municipal elections and other Local Bodies elections, the constituencies are known as Wards. Thus, there may be as many Wards or Constituencies as the number of elected seats in the elected body. Reserved constituencies are those constituencies in which seats are reserved for SCs and STs on the basis of their population.

An electorate is a group of voters, namely, all the officially qualified voters within a particular country or area or for a particular election.

A joint electorate is one where the entire voting population of a country or region is part of a single electorate, and the entire electorate votes for the candidates who contest elections.

In the case of separate electorates, the voting population of a country or region is divided into different electorates, based on certain factors such as religion, caste, gender, and occupation. Here, members of each electorate votes only to elect representatives for their electorate. Separate electorates are usually demanded by minorities who feel it would otherwise be difficult for them to get fair representation in government. separate electorate for Muslims means that Muslims will choose their separate leader by separate elections for Muslims.

In India’s pre-independence era, when the Muslims in India demanded fair representation in power-sharing with the British government along with the Hindus in 1906, the British government provided for a separate electorate system for the Muslims in Government of India Act 1909. As a result, of the total 250 seats of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, 117 seats were kept reserved for the Muslims. Accordingly, the general elections of 1937 were held on the basis of the extended separate electorates, where only the Muslims voted for the 117 seats, in Bengal.

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