One nation, one poll | One-click republic

On September 1, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance government appointed an eight-man committee headed by former president Ram Nath Kovind to examine and suggest the way forward for its One Nation, One Poll (ONOP) proposal. Just two days later—on a Sunday—law ministry officials briefed Kovind on the constitutional provisions pertaining to the proposal and discussed what kind of assistance his committee may need to look into the subject. Many also speculated that ONOP could be the surprise awaited in the upcoming special session of Parliament between September 18-22. If not haste, that’s certainly extraordinary persistence on the part of the BJP.With the Lok Sabha polls due in less than a year, Opposition parties have raised apprehensions about the move, stating that conducting simultaneous polls will spell disaster for India’s multi-party framework and thrust the country into a presidential system of governance. They also point to bias in the composition of the committee and believe the real intent is to push through laws that will ultimately benefit only Narendra Modi and enable his government to evade accountability. What makes these concerns seem legitimate is the fact that only one Opposition leader, Congress’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, was appointed to the Kovind committee, though he ultimately declined to be part of it, dismissing the exercise as an “eyewash” and claiming that the committee’s “terms of reference” were such that they would only “guarantee its conclusions”. Thus, the Kovind panel, as of now, is devoid of any non-BJP political leader, except Ghulam Nabi Azad, who quit the Congress last year to form his own regional party in Jammu and Kashmir. Non-Congress Opposition parties, too, have vehemently opposed the ONOP idea. “One Nation, One Poll is an attempt to undermine federalism,” Tamil Nadu chief minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) supremo M.K. Stalin said on social media on September 3, wondering why his party, the third-largest in the Lok Sabha, does not find representation on the Kovind panel. The same day, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge was on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “This idea has been extensively examined and rejected by three committees in the past. It remains to be seen whether the fourth one has been constituted with a pre-decided outcome in mind. It baffles us that a representative from the prestigious Election Commission of India has been excluded from the committee.”Whatever be the government’s intention, what’s indisputable is that ONOP cannot be implemented overnight with just parliamentary legislation. It will require extensive changes in the Constitution, some of which will have to be approved by the majority of the state legislatures for the new law to come into force. These entail changes to Article 83 (duration of both houses of Parliament), Article 85 (relating to sessions of Parliament, its prorogation and dissolution), Article 172 (duration of state legislatures), Article 174 (relating to the dissolution of the state legislatures) and Article 356 (about the imposition of President’s rule). Currently, the BJP is in power either on its own or as part of ruling coalitions in almost half of India’s states. While that may hold the party in good stead to some extent, navigating legal challenges on constitutional issues won’t be that simple.There are other implications too. The ONOP system, if implemented immediately, will defer assembly polls for Mizoram, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana—all due later this year—to 2024. Elections for these states may then be held along with polls in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, around the same time as the Lok Sabha election. Such a situation naturally raises the question of whether this will mean the imposition of President’s rule in some states, especially in the five that are to go to the polls before December-end this year. That will invariably weaken the ruling parties’ grip on governance in their respective states.The Modi government’s ONOP push is not a bolt out of the blue, though. Ever since it assumed office in 2014, the BJP has been chasing that goal doggedly. In December 2015, a parliamentary standing committee had prepared a report that supported holding simultaneous polls to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies. Two years later, Bibek Debroy and Kishore Desai authored a paper for the Niti Aayog on simultaneous polls, and in August 2018, the Law Commission held that amending the Constitution is imperative to implementing a One Nation, One Poll system. The commission had recommended syncing assembly elections with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by extending or reducing the tenures of a few state legislatures, such as those of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Delhi. For other states, the commission had suggested that elections be held towards the end of 2021, over two years after the Lok Sabha polls. OPPOSITION PARTIES ARE CONCERNED THAT THE ‘ONE NATION, ONE POLL’ IDEA, IF IMPLEMENTED, MAY HURT INDIA’S MULTI-PARTY SYSTEM AND USHER IN PRESIDENTIAL-STYLE ELECTIONS Raking up the subject once again, the Modi government hopes to see the ONOP idea through to fulfilment this time. But it’s a daunting task, and the outcome may not exactly be on favourable terms. There is the key challenge of managing varying perceptions for the state and Lok Sabha elections, especially in states where regional parties have a stronger hold. Beyond that is the mammoth problem of mobilising support from various political parties and stakeholders and readying up a robust polling infrastructure, including a large number of additional electronic voting and paper trail machines.The ONOP system has its pros and cons. With simultaneous Lok Sabha and state elections, governance may be relatively smoother given that there won’t be disruptions due to the imposition of the Model Code of Conduct ahead of each poll. At the same time, there are worries that an ONOP system could lead to national issues taking centrestage and the ‘Modi factor’ looming large during electioneering, eclipsing regional concerns and hurting smaller parties. The Kovind committee will have to take these and other factors into account to come up with a comprehensive, just and credible approach that’s centred not on political but national good.Edited By: Aditya Mohan WigPublished On: Sep 7, 2023

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