Modi govt is chasing imagined dragons with one nation, one election. Focus on real reforms

The Kovind Committee claims that the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct results in “governance deficit”. This argument is popular with people who haven’t actually read the MCC.

Headquarters of the Election Commission in New Delhi | Representational image | Manisha Mondal | ThePrint

Last June, India’s voters ended the Bharatiya Janata Party’s fantasy of “400 paar”. The democratic dividend of this outcome continues to benefit the country. Most recently, two bills to synchronise state and national elections were kicked up to a parliamentary committee after failing to secure a two-thirds vote in the Lok Sabha on 20 December 2024.

There are many things about Indian elections that need urgent reform: opaque funding, the tendency to hand disproportionate victories to winners, and legislators who sometimes get elected with only a quarter of the vote. All of these are distortions in the translation of the popular will into election outcomes.

What we patently do not need is a wholesale disruption based on flawed logic and dodgy premises. We all have that friend or relative who uses emotional blackmail to force us to make hasty and costly decisions that backfire, with no apology. We may even know a Prime Minister who has that pattern.

The sales pitch for synchronised elections is that it will improve governance, accelerate development, raise GDP growth, lower inflation and shrink deficits. What’s not to like? Simply the fact that this is snake oil. Remember how demonetisation was going to end black money and terrorism?

Logic behind Constitution Amendment

First, let’s see what the 129th Constitution Amendment Bill actually says. According to the Bill, if Parliament or a state assembly is dissolved before its full five-year term is completed, the remaining period will be called the “unexpired term”. The legislature that is elected in the ensuing midterm election will have a tenure only as long as the unexpired term. In other words, if a central or state government falls three years into its tenure, the new Parliament or assembly will have a truncated tenure of two years, at the end of which a general election will be held. Or it could have a tenure of one year if it falls after four years.

Two problems are obvious. One is that we now have two classes of elections even though voters are voting for the same legislature with the same powers. This seems like a fundamental shift in the nature of Indian elections, contrary to protestations of Bill supporters that there is no change in the basic structure.

This Bill could also increase the frequency of elections. If a government falls today, you still have two elections over a five-year period for that legislature since the second term will have a full five-year duration. If the Bill is passed, you would compulsorily have three elections over a five-year period in that situation. India has undergone periodic phases of political instability. If another phase recurs, we could end up with even more elections under this Bill.

What about the claim of better governance? The Kovind Committee claims that the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (MCC), that comes into operation about a month before the election, “affects the pace of the developmental programmes” and halts “routine administrative initiatives”, resulting in “policy paralysis” and “governance deficit”. This argument is popular with the large number of people who haven’t actually read the MCC. 

The MCC prohibits the announcement of financial grants, promises to build roads, provide drinking water etc., lay foundation stones or make ad hoc government appointments. What is specifically prohibited is announcements and displays that could shape voter perception. As former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa has written, “the MCC doesn’t curtail expenditure on ongoing schemes, routine government expenditure or any kind of emergency spending.”

The real reason for any paralysis is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tendency to treat even panchayat elections as national missions. Harish Salve, a member of the Kovind Committee, gave the game away when he stated in a TV interview that in Maharashtra this year “almost every important member of the Union cabinet was there campaigning, half the attention of the ruling party is in that state, that’s the nature of the animal, that’s how it has to be.” No, sir, that is not “how it has to be”. Why should the Constitution and federalism be made to pay the price for the PM’s inability to prioritise?

Election system reforms

The sales pitch of higher GDP (1.5 percentage points), lower inflation (1.1 percentage points) and all-round economic nirvana comes from a paper by Singh and Mishra (2024) that is presented as an entire chapter plus appendix in the Kovind Committee report. It suffices to say that these strong claims are built on deviations from the usual assumptions of the “difference-in-differences” statistical methodology, prompting even the authors to qualify their findings by acknowledging that it is not “a strictly causal analysis.”

It gets worse. On page 179, the paper brings “election cycles where 40 per cent or more of the states had their lower house elections in the year of national elections” into its definition of simultaneous elections. On page 182, it goes on to say: “If the assembly election happens to fall in the same year as the national elections of the lower house, that state election is defined to be a simultaneous election for the state.” 

As they say, kuchh bhi. By this definition, the four state elections held between September and November 2024 were also synchronised elections, which completely undermines the logic of the entire exercise.

Meanwhile, other research (that the Kovind Committee somehow didn’t cite) has found, using richer, constituency-level data, that “synchronised representation does not lead to any economic gains” (see Balasubramaniam, Bhatiya and Das 2020). Given the clear lack of consensus on the issue, it would have been more intellectually honest of the Kovind Committee to present both sides of the argument.

So, does this mean that we should persist with the status quo? Absolutely not. There are at least three important debates to be had about election reform:

1. Opaque political funding: Electoral bonds are thankfully gone, but election funding remains a central – though not the only – motivation for political corruption. My colleagues Rajeev Gowda and Varun Santhosh have advocated public funding to level the playing field, an idea worth considering.
2. Disproportionality: The first-past-the-post electoral system in India is known to generate majorities, often disproportionately. For example, in 1984, the Indian National Congress won 414 seats, with only 48 per cent of the vote. In 2019, the BJP won 303 seats with only 37 per cent of the vote. Should India consider a semi-proportional system, like Sri Lanka, that combines the best of both systems?
3. Accurate voter preferences. In constituencies with many candidates, a legislator can be elected with 25-30 per cent of the vote. Some electoral systems require a 50 per cent win to be elected, with a runoff between the top two candidates to ensure that no votes are wasted. An alternative method that avoids an extra round of voting, as done in Rajya Sabha elections, Australia and Ireland, is for voters to rank their preferences. After counting, the lower-ranked candidates are eliminated and their voters’ second and third-preference votes are added to the candidates who are still left. Eventually, one candidate, most preferred by voters, gets a majority.

These are reforms that could solve an actual shortcoming in India’s electoral system, rather than chasing windmills and imagined dragons.

Amitabh Dubey is a Congress member. He tweets @dubeyamitabh. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)