One Nation, One Election | Where principle of representation is a casualty

India’s Constitution did not envisage a fixed-term Parliament or assemblies with good reason — because these were precisely the institutions in which politics had to be negotiated, and support gained or lost

The substance of any objections to the proposal for instituting simultaneous elections for the entire country are multifariously political and civic. The jejune argument about cuts in expenditure are by far offset by the substantive damages to democratic representation and citizenship rights.

First, simultaneous elections would involve rewriting the Constitution — in respect of creating fixed-term legislative bodies, which in turn would necessarily create the conditions in which minority dispensations could function with all the trappings of majority power.

Fixed-term legislative bodies are usually compatible with systems based on proportional representation, in which reasonably long, tortuous, and accommodative discussions can take place to allow governments to be formed and survive. Post-war Italian history is the exception that tests the rule.

The point is that our Constitution did not envisage a fixed-term Parliament or assemblies with good reason. Because these were precisely the institutions in which politics had to be negotiated, and support gained or lost. As we know there is no such thing as a ‘mid-term election’ in India because the Constitution stipulates only a maximum term for Parliament, no minimum terms.

A comparative study of Indian electoral and political history with 1967 serving as a watershed would prove instructive. Till 1967, in three elections, the Congress had its social constituencies sewn up and except for Kerala in 1957 won all assembly and parliamentary elections. Its social constituencies started to come unstuck in the mid-1960s as the upwardly mobile middle castes deserted the party because it was unable to accommodate them.

Breakaway factions led to the humbling of the Congress in north India and elsewhere — it lost nine out of 16 states. But social negotiations mirrored by institutional negotiations meant that the Congress came back to power in many places. A period of creative anarchy followed, out of which the politics of the 1980s to early 2000s was fashioned.

It is this creative politics — otherwise known as democracy — that the Narendra Modi government wants to stultify and destroy by the anti-democratic proposal of ‘one nation, one election’. Luckily, it’s unlikely to get off the ground.

What holds good for Parliament, holds much more critically for the states. How can a state assembly be kept artificially alive by the diktat essentially of the Centre? Who will exercise power? What gubernatorial manipulations will clinch the balance of forces? We have seen it all before.

The biggest argument against simultaneous elections, flagged even by sympathetic proponents like the Law Commission in 2018, is that logistically it is a non-starter. Earlier, a parliamentary standing committee in its 79th report in 2015 also studied the possibility of holding simultaneous elections. Titled ‘Feasibility of Holding Simultaneous Elections to the House of People (Lok Sabha) and State Legislative Assemblies’ the report made infeasible recommendations on simultaneous elections. In 2018, the NITI Aayog similarly equivocated.

Former Secretary General of the Lok Sabha P D T Achary summarised the difficulties: “Articles ranging from duration of Houses of Parliament, to dissolution of the House of the People by the President to duration of the State Legislatures and article pertaining to dissolution of the State Legislatures and Article 356 relating to the imposition of President’s Rule in the States needs to be amended.”

Alongside these acts of vandalism, dragooning the panchayati raj system, with its protean complexities, into this totalising rubric, would kill it in letter and spirit. The whole point, for instance, of the gram panchayat elections is that it is fought without party symbols. A nod to Jayaprakash Narayan’s party-less democracy, though panchayat samiti and zilla parishad elections are fought on party symbols. What solution will this unworkable, unthought-through proposal provide? I’ll return to this question.

Thus, we are confronted by three problems. First, the proposal for perpetually simultaneous elections seeks to revise the Constitution and the polity in ways that run counter to constitutional democracy as established, seeking as it does the inauguration of a plebiscitary style of governance, and the subversion of the principles of election and representation.

Second, the proposals seek to destroy the basic principle of co-operative federalism, which, in fact, follows from the above. The people of a state must be allowed to elect their government, especially when subversion of elected state governments has become routine.

Finally, the logistics of the exercise, thankfully, might defeat this attempt at institutionalising a plebiscitary polity in which the fundamental principle of representation, the heart of democracy, will become a casualty. But who knows? That could be the cue for more jackboots on the ground.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH