One India, One Election

 Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora has given the ECI’s thumbs up for holding simultaneous polls across India that resonates and echoes with prime minister Narendra Modi and BJP’s call for ‘One India, One Election’. This means Lok Sabha and state assembly elections will be held together. Modi has been repeatedly emphasising on ‘One Nation, One Election’ as a necessity for development. There is an election in India almost every month- Madhya Pradesh, Manipur and Bihar, among other States, had elections recently- which involves a lot of money. Modi has asked the presiding officers of elected bodies to ponder over the idea of having one election and one voters’ list. The prime minister is right in pointing out that frequent elections hampered development due to the huge expenditure involved. The country has adopted a quasi-federal set-up in our Constitution. India is neither unitary like Britain nor fully federal like the US. Members are elected for the Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assembly. The historic split in the monolithic Congress in 1969 ultimately led to the premature dissolution of the Lok Sabha, thus disrupting the simultaneous elections to the lower house and state assemblies. Another factor that helped this disruption was the liberal use of Article 356 of the constitution for the dismissal of state governments and dissolution of assemblies before this terms ended. Given these circumstances, it was not possible to hold simultaneous elections. In fact, no one gave any serious thought to it in all these years. “One Nation One Election” is not a unique experiment in our country. Simultaneous elections have been conducted for the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies simultaneously in India in 1952, 1957, 1962 and 1967. This practice was discontinued in 1968-69, because some Legislative Assemblies were dissolved earlier due to various reasons. Since then India is trying hard to adopt the old election system but there is no consensus among the political parties. Holding just one mega election would be too complex an exercise to tackle in a country as large and as complex as India. It would be a logistic nightmare – requiring, for example, about twice as many electronic voting machines and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail machines as are used now. There is also the view that simultaneous elections would benefit the party that is nationally dominant at the cost of smaller regional players – in other words, the BJP would get an unfair advantage. Also, what happens if any government collapses before completing its term? Several state legislatures have been extremely unstable in recent years, and the BJP has been the primary agent of instability in many cases. The anti-defection law is special to India. It has, however, failed in its mission. Split and merger gave room for conflict between the Speaker’s jurisdiction and the court’s role. The prime cause for the instability of elected governments could be traced to the decision of the Governor who is beholden to the party in power at the Centre, to dismiss State governments run by opposition parties. Destabilisation of elected State governments is blatantly being resorted by all political parties. This has led to a term called ‘resort politics’. The plea for ‘One India ,One Election’ is not merely about development as it has a hidden agenda of legitimising one party one government rule that is fraught with inherent dangers for the country.