India’s federal cabinet has approved a “One Nation, One Election” proposal which envisages elections to the country’s 30 state legislatures be held simultaneously with the general election for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.
The concept is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream project to change the way the Indian republic governs itself within the democratic boundaries enunciated in its 75-year-old written constitution.
Also, part of his dream — and the nightmare of the opposition parties and civil society — is a uniform civil code that will override traditional personal laws of religious communities.
India has a nearly 80 percent Hindu population, but the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindu groups that support it, feel they have been thwarted because Muslims form a potent vote bank for the nearly 140-year-old Congress Party, and powerful regional parties in large states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Kerala.
The BJP-Hindu groups and their social media say Muslims — who make up 14 percent of the country’s population — with their “high birth rate” will eventually outnumber Hindus in the nation of 1.4 billion people.
Even in the face of powerful campaigns such as the ones that propelled the BJP to power in 2014, in 2019, and the third time in May 2024 with a drastically reduced majority, they believe Muslims and other minority groups helped Congress and regional parties retain power in several states, which they use as a base to constantly challenge Modi at the grassroots.
Modi, who leads the BJP, thinks he has stymied the opposition’s “vote bank.”
First, he outlawed Muslims’ instant divorce, or “triple” talaq, and banned polygamy for men in government service. Then tested the waters for a national common civil code by enacting it first in Uttarakhand, one of the smallest Hindu-dominated states in north India.
In essence, simultaneously held polls to parliament and state assemblies will let a national narrative overwhelm all other issues, including bread-and-butter ones like education, agriculture, local employment and improvement of life in small towns and some 600,000 villages.
Modi feels, and his lieutenants and acolytes agree, that he is a master in pitching a single mega issue that will catch the national imagination. The construction of the Ram Temple was the one that swung the 2024 election. The 2014 poll campaign saw him mix Islamophobia with an equal dose of promises to the youth for a better future, or “acche din” (better days) as he said in his mother tongue, Gujarati.
He set up a committee headed by former president, Ram Nath Kovind, to study the “One Nation, One Election” proposal, with a focus on the money that would be saved by doing away with the currently prevalent multiple and staggered elections.
The Kovind committee did exactly what Modi had expected of it.
The committee wanted to show it had contacted a vast section of the nation’s population. It set up an online questionnaire with a tight deadline, though it agreed to written and oral presentations by political parties, trade unions, and special interest groups including industry and business. Civil society was largely shunned, as were religious and caste groups.
The BJP, with its allied Hindu groups, organized a major digital media campaign in support of simultaneous elections. The Kovind committee received some 21,558 responses, mostly online.
The committee’s 18,626-page report to Indian President Droupadi Murmu said 80 percent of the people were in favor of simultaneous elections. Of the 47 political parties that responded, 32 favored the system and 15 opposed it, calling it anti-democratic and anti-federal.
The report summary did not give details of the parties that supported the simultaneous elections proposal, but most analysts guessed these to be part of the ruling National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP.
The Congress and major regional parties that are in power at state level expressed apprehension that simultaneous elections will marginalize regional parties, encourage the dominance of national parties, and result in a presidential form of government.
The Modi cabinet this week accepted the report’s recommendation for holding simultaneous elections to parliament and the state legislatures which would save public money and manpower resources.
But this is easier said than done. An expert in getting his way, Modi may well ram it down the throat of parliament, though it has regained some of its voice with surprise wins for the opposition parties in several states in the general election held this spring.
The prime minister has faced embarrassing rebuttals from a bigger number of opposition MPs in the Lok Sabha, especially from the newly elected Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party.
The Kovind report says most experts it consulted agree that the constitution and related laws will have to be amended. But, according to the report, these “will not be anti-democratic or anti-federal” and will not go against the “basic structure” of the constitution.
The report seeks to disarm all critics who accuse Modi of arrogance in governance, often even bypassing the cabinet. The prime minister is an admirer of the presidential form of government in the United States. But Kovind assures that simultaneous elections will not erode federalism and will not lead to a presidential form of government.
Major opposition parties, constitutional experts, and even former chief election commissioners are not convinced.
Mixing a presidential system with the federal system will create a situation where the will of the people on matters related to their state government will be diluted very severely, experts say.
The Kovind committee wants the automatic retirement of the state legislatures, however young, to enable the elections to parliament to be held simultaneously with elections to the state assemblies
In addition, as S. Y. Quraishi, a former chief election commissioner, said: “Playing with an established democratic system and the Constitution is a questionable exercise. If the proposal was sincere, why have all the elections been prolonged in the last 10 years? It puts a question mark on the sincerity of the proposal put forward in the name of national interest.”
Jagdeep S. Chhokar, a major voice in election reforms, said even if all politicians agreed to a simultaneous election, and even if approved by parliament and the required number of state assemblies, such an election system would be violative of the basic structure of the constitution. “Elections and democracy are not the exclusive preserve of the politicians and political parties; citizens also have a stake,” he stressed.
Amitabha Pande, a retired civil servant and member of the Constitutional Conduct Group that keeps a sharp eye on the government’s actions, said: “The dangerous assumption here is that the need to periodically seek the mandate of the people is an unnecessary burden which comes in the way of efficiency. Governance is viewed as something superior to and outside the practice of democracy and as the preserve of the bureaucracy and the political executive which controls it. The people, the voters, have nothing to do with it.”
Said in jest in the past, the quip “Why not one nation, one political party, one leader” does not sound so funny now.
source : ucanews