Centralisation of polity

 Holding simultaneous polls for Lok Sabha, state assemblies and panchayats or One Nation One Poll(ONOP) has been on the agenda of prime minister Narendra Modi and his BJP party. In the previous 16th Lok Sabha, the BJP had 282 and with the NDA the coalition government had 334 MPs. After another huge landslide in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, where Modi led his party to win 302 seats on its own and the tally with NDA shooting to a mammoth 353, the agenda for ONOP got off soon after the 17th Lok Sabha was constituted. The Modi government made a strong bid to push it through with a meeting with chiefs of all political parties. This concept calls for a single election for state legislatives, Lok Sabha and Panchayats in a span of five years. It is supposed to bring a major reform in the electoral system and functioning of one of the largest democracies of the world. Simultaneous polls were held in 1952, 1957 and 1962. However the cycle was broken after the fourth Lok Sabha ended prematurely. Premature dissolutions and extensions of Lok Sabha and various state assemblies in the past 40 years have ended the cycle of simultaneous elections. There are two sides of the coin on ONOP- the plus and minus. It may be noted that owing to the complex and diverse political nature of India, this concept poses a major challenge for adopting the system of simultaneous elections. ONOP would reduce government election expenditure, save wasted time on elections and thus provide more time for productivity. Parties will also be under scrutiny and discouraged from sourcing illegal money for expenditure. It will also avoid regularity in deployment of security personnel on poll duties that seem to be held almost every year. The minus points are that, apart from logistical considerations, ONOP cannot be a serious reason for a major change to the basic structure of the Indian polity. The Indian constitution calls India a ‘Union of states’ and the concept of federalism has divided legislative, executive and judiciary powers between the State and the Centre under Part XI. The constitution defines legislative powers separately between the Centre and the State, with three different lists- the state list, the union list and the concurrent list. Both levels of governments have their own jurisdiction to hold power, to make laws and execute them. The major problem, to put it more simply, “one nation, one election” is anti-democratic. ONOP is a thinly veiled attempt to replace the present form of multi-party elections into a presidential form of election. Otherwise, why should the election calendar in any given state be synchronized with that of the Centre? Doing so would rob a state of one of the essential elements of Westminster democracy: A government may choose to dissolve itself, or a government may fall if its loses its majority, and then the governor, acting on behalf of the president of the republic, will be obliged either to ask another combine to form a government, or must perforce call fresh elections. When GST(one nation , one tax) was being implemented by the UPA, Modi was the most vociferous opponent. ONOP is part of the larger agenda of one nation one law or the Uniform Civil Code but with a brute majority, Modi could just carry the day.