Drop the bad idea of simultaneous elections

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• In recent weeks, there has been increasing discussion about the possibility of having national and State elections at the same time, popularly known as ‘one nation, one election’.

The favoured Arguments

• The primary arguments in favour of simultaneous elections are twofold: first, that it will decrease the costs of conducting elections (and of electioneering); and second, that it will free up political parties from being in ‘permanent campaign mode’, and allow them to focus on governance for a five-year period.

Point and counterpoint

• Against this, critics have pointed out that when you crunch the numbers, the actual financial savings are relatively minuscule.
• Furthermore, it is a relatively recent pathology of the Indian political system that central government Ministers and politicians spend a significant amount of time campaigning in State elections.
• State elections should be primarily fought by State party units, while national politicians can get on with the task of governance.
• Furthermore the logistical nightmare of conducting simultaneous elections in a country of a little over 1.4 billion people, in a context where even State elections need to take place in multiple phases.
• The graver concern, is the incompatibility of a rigid election timetable with some of the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy: as is well-known, at the time of Independence, central and State elections were conducted simultaneously.
• This arrangement broke down towards the end of the 1960s because of the use of Article 356 of the Constitution, which authorises the Union to suspend (or even dismiss) State governments in a narrowly-defined range of circumstances.
• Consequently, it is obvious that even if, legally and practically, one is able to synchronise central and State elections for one cycle, this will break down the moment a government falls.

The possibility of more ‘horse-trading’

• The upshot of this is that there will be a strong push towards avoiding the fall of a government, even when it has lost the confidence of the House in the ordinary course of things.
• And, as we have seen in India, there is an almost institutionalised remedy for this: defections, or “horse-trading”.
• It is, by now, clear that the Tenth Schedule’s prohibition on horse-trading has been rendered more or less a dead letter, as politicians have found various ways to get around this.
• While these intractable issues speak to the implementation of simultaneous elections, at a deeper level, there are two principled and interrelated arguments against the idea: federalism and democracy.

Keeping absolute power in check

• A related point is that in our constitutional scheme, the federal structure is an important check upon the concentration of power.
• The federal structure, in turn, is sustained by a plurality of democratic contests, and a plurality of political outfits, at the State level.
• Simultaneous elections, for the reasons pointed out above, risk undermining that plurality, and risk precisely the kind of concentration of power that federalism is meant to be a bulwark against.
• Despite the ringing words with which the Preamble of the Constitution begins, the “People” have very little space in the Constitution, especially when it comes to exercising control over their representatives.
• Unlike many other Constitutions, where public participation in law-making is a guaranteed right, along with other rights such as the right to recall, in the Indian constitutional scheme, elections are the only form of public participation in the public sphere.

Way forward

• Therefore, it is clear that the administrative benefits from simultaneous elections are overstated at best, and non-existent at worst.
• However, the costs, both in the implementation and in the concept itself, are significant, and create non-trivial risks when it comes to protecting and preserving the federal and democratic design of the Constitution