By P.K.Balachandran/Daily News
Colombo, March 19: The Narendra Modi government in India appears to be in favour of holding simultaneous elections to the Indian parliament, the State legislatures and a multiplicity of local bodies from 2029 onwards.
A government-appointed committee under the chairmanship of former President Ram Nath Kovind had recommended it in a report it submitted to President Droupadi Murmu last Thursday.
If the government accepts the recommendation, elections will have to be held simultaneously for the Lower House of the national parliament (Lok Sabha), 28 State Assemblies, eight Union Territory Legislative Assemblies and 283,976 Local Bodies. The task involves catering to a humongous voting population of more than a billion (the voting population in 2024 itself is 968 million).
This will be a logistic nightmare, expensive and time consuming too. Take for example the forthcoming elections to the 18 th. Lok Sabha (the Lower House of parliament). It will take place in no less than seven phases between April 19 and June 1, 2024. If a single election is going to take so much time, how much more time would be needed to hold simultaneous elections in 543 parliamentary constituencies, 4126 State Assembly and Union Territory constituencies, and 283,976 local bodies?
India had held simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies from 1952 to 1967. Indeed, these were held without any hitch. But the population was lower, at 373 million in 1952 and 522 million in 1967. But the population now has ballooned to 1.4 billion. Other conditions in India have also changed vastly since then.
The opposition parties and a section of public intellectuals are opposing simultaneous elections on a variety of grounds, while the BJP and the parties aligned with it are hailing it as a panacea for the many ills of the present electoral system.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) views the concept of simultaneous elections as part of its plan to unify the diverse country along as many parameters as possible. The unstated objective of the synchronized elections is to capitalise on the perceived mass all-India appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Structural Changes
The Kovind committee suggested 15 constitutional amendments through two bills. The first bill could be passed by parliament without the involvement of the States. The second Bill which deals with municipal and panchayat elections, as well as the creation of a Single Electoral Roll for the country by the Election Commission of India (ECI), will require the approval or ratification of more than half of India’s States.
As per the Kovind committee’s recommendation, when the Lok Sabha is dissolved, the State Assemblies will also get dissolved simultaneously. If elections for parliament and the State Assemblies are to be held simultaneously as suggested in 2029, many State Assemblies will be dissolved in 2029 much before the end of their five-year terms to facilitate simultaneous elections for parliament and State Assemblies.
In the normal course, the 10 States that got new elected Assemblies in 2023, should hold their next elections in 2028. But under the proposed system, the newly elected Assemblies of 2028 will exist only for about a year or less as they will be dissolved in 2029 for the proposed simultaneous elections.
States in this category are: Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Karnataka, Telangana, Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Gujarat will go to the polls in 2027. As such, they will have Assemblies only with a life of two years, as they will have to go for fresh elections in 2029 as part of the synchronized all-India election.
West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, and Kerala will have Assemblies with a three-year tenure as they will go for elections in 2026 and get dissolved in 2029.
Only the Assemblies of Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Haryana that go to polls in 2024, will have completed their full term by the time the synchronised elections are held in 2029.
Be that as it may, the Kovind committee did not insist that synchronized elections should be held in 2029, leaving it to the government to decide on the year of transition. The report is only a set of recommendations. It will have to overcome objections from various quarters and may have to face scrutiny in the Supreme Court because there are constitutional barriers to these recommendations.
Constitutional Barriers
For instance, the Constitution currently provides an equal five-year tenure for every elected assembly and Parliament. An amendment to this will impair the constitutional right that each voter and the returned candidate is endowed with, writes Manuraj Shunmugasundaram, a lawyer for the DMK, in Indian Express.
The Tamil Nadu Assembly urged the Central government not to implement the simultaneous elections policy. Chief Minister M K Stalin termed it as “dangerous and autocratic”. Further, the concept of simultaneous elections is not in the Indian Constitution, he pointed out.
Shunmugasundaram argues that simultaneous elections in all tiers from the parliament to the local bodies would go against the “grain of federalism”.
The Indian constitution established a three-tier system of government, at the Union, State and local body levels, to promote representative democracy. According to him election data shows that voters in the three tiers raise distinctly different demands and approach each with different things in their minds. “What needs to be addressed at the national level through parliamentary law-making is vastly different from what is addressed by the local municipal corporation. While matters of foreign policy, income tax or national security would dominate thinking during parliamentary elections, issues of water, property tax and roads would dominate the agenda during the local bodies’ elections,” he points out.
“There is a concern that combining elections at various levels might blur this distinction, leading to a centralised approach that could neglect local issues and dilute lower-tier democratic representation,” Shunmugasundram points out. .
Supportive Arguments
Supporting synchronised elections in a discussion paper commissioned by a Central planning organization NITI Ayog, Bibek Debroy and Kishore Desai point out that in the absence of simultaneous elections, India will always be in an election mode. Somewhere, some election will be taking place, and governments and political parties will be involved in it, neglecting both routine and developmental work, they say.
For example, between 2014 and 2016, besides the Lok Sabha elections, polls were held in 15 State Assemblies. During the elections, governments have to adhere to the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) which forbids the announcement or implementation of any new development scheme. Development programmes of the Union and State Governments grind to a halt, leading to a governance deficit.
Debroy and Desai point out that in 2014, governance and developmental activities due to the imposition of the Model Code remained suspended for about seven months, three months across India and about two months in Jharkhand and Kashmir and another two months in Maharashtra and Haryana.
Elections lead to huge expenditures by various stakeholders. Debroy and Desai say that if one takes the expenditure of the Central government alone, it has been going up by leaps and bounds over the years. The cost of conducting the 2009 Lok Sabha elections was about INR 11,150 million (about US$ 134 million at the present rate) but the cost of the 2014 elections had tripled to about INR 38,700 million (US$ 467 million).
Political parties also spend huge amounts of money. They spent INR 15,880 million (about US$ 191.5 million) in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections alone.
Further, political parties need to keep the flow of funds for their frequent campaigns. As a result, corruption and black-money circulation become rampant. This problem will be lessened if simultaneous elections become the norm. It has also been pointed out that frequent elections also result in parties raising divisive issues like caste and communalism, constantly poisoning the atmosphere. Election violence, another problem, will be continuous.
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