ONOE — Authentic Aspiration or Bogus Strategy!
OVERVIEW
One Nation One Election, quite a beautiful thought in a country crowded by citizens of diverse caste, creed, language, demographics, political ideologies, socio-economic realities (the differences are endless ) and an aspiring bid to bring them all together under one policy. Although the concept of simultaneous elections is not new and was, in fact, practised continuously for 15 years post-Independence its outcomes in reality in the present realm should be analyzed before implementing any legislation.
So, let’s just verify this whole idea about One Nation One Election with some valuable insights.
First of all, what really is ONOE or Simultaneous elections? — We know in our nation we currently have 2 main elections, the Lok Sabha or General elections and the Vidhan Sabha or State Assembly elections. Both take place over a tenure of 5 years, but at different time frames. For example, we witnessed Lok Sabha elections in 2009,2014, 2019 happening consistently every 5 years but State elections are going all round the year. Some states like Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand held elections in 2019 while Delhi entered polling booth this month.
ONOE proposes to bind both these elections together on a single date thus reducing the cost and time period of conducting elections.
PRELUDE
“We cannot expect to see the next election any better than 2019 in terms of freeness, fairness and transparency if the rising tide of criminalization of politics and overarching influence of money in politics isn’t stemmed.” -SY Quraishi, Former Chief Election Commissioner
According to the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) INR 60,000 crore ($ 8 billion) was spent on 2019 Lok Sabha elections, twice of that compared to 2014, top-charting Indian elections the world’s most expensive election.
Rs 700, that was the amount spent per voter in the 2019 polls, more than enough to buy a month’s groceries for a BPL family.
The trend started back in 1999 with the figure jumping from 10,000 crores to 30,000 crores by 2014
1999–10,000 crore
2004–14,000 crore
2009–20,000 crore
2014- 30,000 crore
2019–60,000 crore
Roughly a third of the total expense — was spent towards campaigning and publicity like giving large sums of money on vehicles during election campaigns, campaigning equipment, election rallies, electronic and print media, banners, hoardings and pamphlets, field visits etc. The second big expenditure head was putting money directly in the hands of the voter. CMS estimates that roughly 25 per cent, about Rs 15,000 crore, was distributed among voters, illegally. Although lesser than Lok Sabha elections, State Assembly elections are also not much different when it comes to the proverb of 3M’s, i.e. Money, Muscles and Mind. So, the question is, won’t it curb the illicit use of finance if we combine both the bids together?
Taking the time-consuming factor into consideration, 2019 Indian general election was held in seven phases from 11 April to 19 May 2019, spanning over a period of 38 days. Indian elections are conducted in multiple phases for the sake of administration and security. Why is it undesirable to have a fragmented polling process is simply because it imposes practical difficulties of its own? Having polling time of over one month provides gaps for parties to analyze their regional vote share and push for malpractices in consecutive voting stations. And what’s worse is that in many states Legislative assembly elections follows adding to wastage off additional time to conduct those elections. So, 2 reasons to support ONOE right?
But that’s not it, there’s more profit to this proposal. If both elections are held together political parties and elected governments can shift their focus on implementing their manifesto rather than preparing propaganda for the next election. Govt machinery and officials including bureaucrats, clerks, govt employees, public servants, police and security personnel need not be transferred or allotted additional responsibilities annually, thereby ensuring the smooth functioning of government bodies like revenue, administration, security and ensuring ease of life for public. For instance, we witnessed during the 2019 Kerala by-elections how more priority was given on conducting elections rather than post-traumatic care in water logged-affected constituencies of Manjeshwaram, Ernakulam and Konni.
ONOE can also keep a check on the inflow of black money and counterfeit currency as multiple elections bolster the practice of spending crores to envisage vote banks. Needless to say, we can also curb funding of anti-national organizations and sentiments since elections are a time of polarization and allegations.
Another major benefit includes to NRI’s as a time-bound election procedure provides them with a chance to systematically follow election dates and cast their votes rather than make frenzied schedules to catch the flight back home and thereby impact the total voter turnout.
But does these advantages really outweigh the possible threats to our federal republic? Is it a One Size Fits All Solution? Who all are in fact proactive about this idea and are they really concerned about poor tax payer’s money being spent unnecessarily or is it a strategy to sabotage power? Let’s have a look at the possible side effects too.
PLOT
1.Encroachment of Federalism and Regional Parties
Here’s why the move to make ONOE mandatory will definitely assault the federal nature of our republic and may even threaten the existence of regional parties.
India is the largest democracy and follows a system of federal parliamentary form of governance. In a federal parliamentary system of government, it’s not one Central authority at the top that controls power and take major decisions but a collaboration of multiple small units that oversee the working of each small region. All the 28 states (J&K was bifurcated) each having its own government is elected to the Assembly. Assemblies are not subordinate to Indian Parliament, they just have different responsibilities and can legislate on most immediate issues such as healthcare, education, law and order, welfare schemes, among many other things. Assemblies are diverse because each of the 28 states is extremely different from one another, not just in terms of language, but in food habits, culture, religious demography, socio-economic realities, distribution of natural resources, population, etc. State elections are always about local needs tailored to the state’s requirement. Precisely why regional parties have developed a strong presence in the last three decades, and have left a mark on the politics of states such as West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, Maharashtra, Delhi and other North Eastern and South Indian states.
The underlying themes and wants of national elections and state-level ones are different. While farm crisis, unemployment, national security could play out big in Lok Sabha elections, assembly elections are usually won or lost on themes such as law and order, education, power and water supply, and health among others. Merging these two plays would deprive the citizen her right to demand services at two different levels. Local issues are important. If both elections are held simultaneously local issues will be subsumed under national ones. While at the national level we talk about foreign affairs and the space programme, at the local levels it’ll be water crisis, flood management, deaths because of encephalitis or cyclone rehabilitation. These issues can’t be given short-shrift. In fact, these are more important to the ordinary citizen. By trying to confuse election issues, the voter is cheated.
Telangana is ruled by Telangana Rashtra Samithi led by K Chandrasekhar Rao, a party formed because of the deep disenchantment with national parties such as Congress and BJP. Similarly, Trinamool Congress’ formation is a response to the political sway of the CPM in Bengal, but also a break from the Congress party. Kerala is ruled by a coalition of left-winged parties such as CPM & CPI which are being extinct elsewhere. Simultaneous elections will critically injure the local immediacy of the state elections since the narrative will be New Delhi-centric, driven by national parties with pan-India presence seeking to maximize their territorial hold. Even though some regional parties such as TMC are deemed “national” for their strength in the Lok Sabha, the emphasis will shift towards Parliament away from the state Assemblies in this divided gaze. If such a situation arises what will a smaller party like Aam Aadmi Party, or even Samajwadi Party do?
2. Dictator defined Democracy
The BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) has always been in favor of “one nation, one poll” since the idea has been part of its 2009 and 2014 manifestoes. In fact, the love of the one, the singularity and centralization thereof, is the overarching tendency in all the major ideas, planks, initiatives of the BJP, thoroughly supported by its ideological parent, the RSS, and the larger Sangh Parivar — Angshukanta Chakraborty, Political editor
One Nation One Election will gift us anarchy if an overwhelmingly authoritarian government isn't sufficed. In the current scenario, under Modi-led NDA rule, states like Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh saw their governments toppled mid-term, and even though the court rejected President’s rule in Uttarakhand, states like Karnataka saw horse-trading over MLA’s and in the end fell prey to well-executed gameplay of BJP. Let’s also remember the Election Commission’s highly dubious disqualification of 20 AAP MLAs over “office of profit” which would have toppled Delhi government had Arvind Kejriwal’s party not have that stupendous majority — 67/70 — in Delhi Assembly. If this is the new normal, one nation, one poll is a poison pill to push more and more states under President’s rule that is a proxy rule of the Union government euphemistically called the Centre.
The weakening of opposition shall also occur since dominance by national parties will ramify ripples in regional parties and entice leaders and members of the same to join in hope of power and prestige. The recent turnaround of ideologies post polls in Maharashtra is just a glimpse of an apocalyptical thriller of what might happen when there is a powerful manipulation market at the Centre, where ironically even foes turn into a family for gaining command at the helm.
3.Premeditated Collapse of Constitution
Arm-twisting Institutions like CBI and ECI is the new normal of the Central government. Unfortunately, even the RTI Amendment bill was passed by Rajya Sabha. But to know that something as pious as the Constitution shall be restructured to meet the demands of the new bill is indeed alarming.
First, Article 83 of the constitution which lays down Duration of Houses of Parliament will be amended, followed by Article 85 for Dissolution of Lok Sabha by the president, Article 172 stating duration of state Legislature, Article 174 dealing with Dissolution of State Assembly, and Article 356 regulating President’s Rule. Excluding these amendments of Articles of the Constitution, changes to “Representation of People Act of 1951” would also be enacted.
Now the grave concerns behind these legislations, if they happen are that Amending Articles 174 and 356 — which deals with ‘Provisions in case of failure of constitutional machinery in State’, or President’s rule — will alter the basic structure of the Constitution and will impinge on federalism. Worse, what really is the mandate if a government fails again after all this herculean task to reorganize the Constitution, Won’t that lead to President’s rule, handing over power indirectly to Centre making democracy a sham. Or will it be a call for Lok Sabha elections which would mean elections in other states too? Or choice for the governors to anoint their favourite leader or party for the sake of governance!
4.Fake Accountability
Pro-ONOE parties claim simultaneous election will anchor accountability and boost development. How do frequent elections forsake development when it mostly reviews the progress of initiatives and development taken over time, be it at the centre or state. So that means it only puts more pressure on the ruling and contesting candidates to highlight their timebound gains and productive projects.
If it is the Model Code of Conduct enacted when elections are announced that is the villain to development, this is as specious as it can get. If ONOE votaries say that frequent elections bring the Model Code of Conduct into play hampering government working then we shouldn’t fault elections for policy paralysis but point to inept leadership. The model code stops the government from announcing new schemes/policies. It does not prevent work on already-announced schemes/policies from continuing.
5.Biased Verdict:
According to a survey by IDFC, there are 77% chances that the Indian voter will vote for the same party for both the state and Centre when elections are held simultaneously because India is a union of states and the central government allots huge money to the government of the same party in the states.
Smaller parties represent marginalised sections of societies whose voices have to be heard. One nation, one election will mean that in the cacophony of majoritarian hectoring, small voices would be muted forever. As a matter of fact, simultaneity will benefit huge parties with staggering cadre base, such as BJP, with enormous financial resources and workforce, helped by the presence of the friendly religious senas in almost every state of India while regional parties with limited to little resources will be swept away in this game of thrones with the media all too obliging to the Union government. (Search Cobra Post)
This puts regional parties at a large risk and disadvantage. National parties have been enthusiastic about implementing ONOE, and reasonably so because it increased their probability of winning in constituencies with less influence and amalgamating the share count of their opponents. The BJP is in favour of the idea of ONOE because it believes it will help BJP to have control throughout the country. Many opinion polls have shown that people support PM Modi but are not happy with their respective chief ministers which might lead to a loss in State Assembly elections. However, if ONOE is implemented their chances of coming into power becomes relatively high.
6. Technological Blunder Citing Time Wastage
It was pointed out in the start about the time-consuming factor of multiple elections, precisely conducting elections in multiple phases. Now the ECI has strictly penned down guidelines for contesting and conducting elections, be it simultaneous or multifarious and one of the stands out regulation is that state elections should be conducted within one day. The Sole reason why EVM’s and VVPAT were introduced and adopted into the Indian voting system amidst widespread criticism about its chances of being tampered and controlled by Ruling parties and mercenaries.
So, in effect, the world’s largest democracy is using the 21st-century technology for a 20th-century process just to speed up the verdict and rightly so. It should be noted even technologically advanced and developed countries like the US still use ballot papers for election, which even have a greater history of election and nation-building compared to ours. So, our move to revolutionize the voting system with a faster means will turn out into a mockery if ONOE is implemented stating time-consuming factors. The twin and related argument of time wasted due to imposition of model code of conduct during various state elections that supposedly leads to stalling of development projects is a bogus one, like other points in favour of electoral simultaneity. Precisely why we saw the announcement of dates for Gujarat Assembly polls delayed unceremoniously because PM Modi needed to shower sops worth Rs 11,000 crore on the poll-bound state in October 2017.
7. Money Mayhem
If the excess expenditure is the concern over multiple elections, we simply have to accept the fact that elections are an expensive affair. After all, we’re not selling pancakes but opting an eligible candidate through a democratic process. How will it be a meaningful action if we’re not electing people worthy of their power as our representatives? Elections are not an exercise carried out for the sake of portrayal of a democratic entity but rather a self-evolving system cementing the existence of a developed Society. Citing expenses for elections means next public institutions that serve social justice, like the judiciary, or public universities, hospitals, public distribution system, will all be deemed too exorbitant. Surely in a country where 3000 crores were allotted to build a Statue of Unity, elections should also be given a priority.
Now speaking factually. Out of India’s total annual expenditure, only 0.05% is spent on elections (As per ECI estimates). So, the whole argument stating multiple elections is the reason for India’s underdevelopment takes a detour. Interestingly, as per the ECI reports, it cost around INR 4500 crores for holding state and assembly elections together in the year 2019, but it is estimated this figure will be around INR 9,284 crores if elections are held together, owing to purchase of additional EVM’s, VVPAT, setting up equal no of polling booths in remote areas, additional maintenance of law and order considering complexity of concurrent polls and so on. Great right!
That’s not it. Out of the total expenditure by political parties, 45% was spent by just one national party- BJP. That means of out of the 60,000 crores expenditure RS 27,000 was catered by BJP, so resources are being swindled not by government machinery but by our own representative govt to purchase power. Just think how desperate they would be to maintain power and keep pumping their coffers! According to a report by an advocacy group, Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), BJP was also the biggest beneficiary of the electoral bond scheme in 2017–18, bagging 94.5% of the bonds.
What electoral bonds actually did is allow that money to be given without any chance of the public getting to know who was donating and to whom even as the party in charge at the Centre has all that knowledge, and the potential to abuse it. BJP amassed a total of ₹6,128 crores worth of electoral bonds since March 2018. Also, an extra window for sale of electoral bonds was created on two occasions — before the Karnataka Assembly elections in May 2018 and once again before the Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Telangana in November-December 2018, to garner funds from corporate houses, which was a direct violation of the scheme’s rule of limited periods for the sale of electoral bonds. Electoral bonds are a “fraud” because neither the donor nor the recipient political party needs to disclose the source of funds and an unlimited amount of money can be donated without any accountability. All this took place amidst RBI objecting to the electoral bond scheme by stating that it would encourage money laundering and violate the spirit of Prevention of Money Laundering Act. One can now see how this effectively turned India’s political funding system into one dominated by corporate special interests while also entrenching the party in power simply because companies wouldn’t want the government to know it was donating to other parties as well.
The result was seizure of Rs 3,475 crore worth of cash and other items during the elections, which included, Rs 844 crore worth of cash, Rs 304 crore worth of liquor, Rs 1,279 crore worth of drugs/narcotics, Rs 987 crore worth of precious metals (gold etc.), and other items or freebies worth Rs 60 crore. Although EC imposes a restriction of 70 lakhs per candidate for Lok Sabha election and 28 lakhs for Assembly election, there are no limits on the expenditure incurred by parties and statistics prove about 100 crores was bypassed in each constituency, just not for the right purposes.
If elections are more expensive, it’s because of political corruption that turns the universal franchise and the foundational principle of a democratic republic into an ugly spectacle of money and muscle power and not because elections as a whole are plethoric.
PRESENT STATUS
In a 2017 paper handed over by NITI Aayog, Bibek Debroy and Kishore Desai state in the introduction itself that “It won’t be unreasonable to state that the Indian polity is perennially in an election mode. Barring a few exceptional years within a normal 5-year tenure of the Lok Sabha, the country witnesses, on an average, elections to about 5–7 State Assemblies every year”.
The Law Commission too submitted a draft report to the government on August 30, 2018, endorsing the proposal. It even recommended changes to the Constitution and the electoral law so as to enable holding simultaneous polls.
On June 19, 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called an All-Party meeting to discuss ONOE. Congress, Trinamool Congress(TMC), Bahujan Samaj Party `(BSP), Samajwadi Party(SP) and Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam (DMK) stayed away from the meet citing various reasons while Aam Aadmi Party(AAP), Telugu Desam Party(TDP) and Telangana Rashtra Samithi(TRP) sent representatives. The “one nation, one election proposal is fundamentally anti-federal and a backdoor way of replacing our parliamentary democracy”, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said after the meeting.
However, the centre may move forward with the idea once the issues of NRC & NPR have been dealt with and even a committee was set up for giving “time-bound” suggestions on the issue of ONOE.
On paper the concept of one nation, one election looks very seductive, but on soil one nation, one election is a devious way to do away with democracy and federalism. If we go by recent electoral trends one nation, one election will centralise power in the hands of one person (the prime minister) who can then steamroll all local aspirations In an era where laws like CAA is enacted and NRC and NPR are reaffirmed it is nearly like giving the sword to the hands of the royal executioner. Power, and only power matters, even when real issues like unemployment, farmer suicides, economic slowdown and rape continue to burn down the integrity of India.
CONCLUSION
Simultaneous elections are a conceptual poison for India’s federalism, democracy and republicanism, and also the spirit of constitutionalism. Each and every aspect of our multifarious parliamentary democracy, conceived as a Union of federal states, with no hierarchy and actually no “Centre” either, just a division of responsibilities, will be grievously injured and left to die a significantly traumatic institutional death, in case this “panacea” that the efficiency marauders are advocating with a passion is swallowed by Indians.
It was the 2019 Lok Sabha polls that were the most expensive elections ever recorded in India, with BJP having the lion’s share of expenses, Congress a distant second. Therefore, the expenses argument is as spurious as the austerity argument of corporate tax-cutting regimes reducing public spending in the name of fiscal prudence while writing off lakhs and crores of loan default and dishing out ever more salacious tax breaks to the filthy rich holding public policy to ransom. Naturally, if the corporates have to pay only once in five years, they will be happy and bat for simultaneous elections. But, what about the people? We are already an “economy for the one per cent”. We cannot become a “democracy for the one per cent”.
“One nation, one election” will also lead to national political parties getting a bigger share of the political pie. Given their financial powers and organisational strengths the big parties will run over smaller ones. Indian democracy needs all types of political parties and across the ideological spectrum.
RSS has always believed in a strong central government. Its icon MS Golwalkar, popularly called Guruji, had proposed doing away with India’s federal structure. We are already at the beginning of erasing India’s heterogeneity. ONOE will take us one step closer to Indian ultimatum, which we will realize posthumous of India.
Disclaimer: We are a platform which allows all views to be represented without bias or discrimination. This piece is not to be judged upon as the final stance of MUNner’s daily or MEC MUN Society.
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