‘One Nation, One Election’ is a bad idea—and not because of Opposition’s ‘Modi phobia’

In ‘normal’ elections, voters have begun to differentiate between national and Assembly elections and vote differently. There is no reason they won’t do the same in synchronised elections.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in the Lok Sabha during the debate on the Constitution on 14 December | ANI

As the government prepares to introduce two bills in the Parliament to set the ball rolling for ‘One Nation, One Election’, the big question that weighs on everyone’s mind is: Can Prime Minister Narendra Modi achieve what LK Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee couldn’t?

After all, reverting to ‘ONOE’ has been on the table for 42 years – since September 1982 when the Election Commission of India proposed it.

Vajpayee pursued it with the Opposition till 2003 and then Advani followed it up till 2010. Modi, who has been advocating ONOE since his chief ministerial days, seems to be getting serious about this now. As is evident from these two bills.

PM Modi’s words and actions on ONOE

I can see many raised eyebrows and frowns: What do you mean ‘getting serious’? Because it took the Prime Minister over nine years to finally initiate the process by setting up the Ram Nath Kovind-led committee in September 2023. PM Modi missed many opportunities to show his commitment to ONOE. For one, he could have gone for simultaneous Assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat in 2022 – both ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party. And for Haryana and Maharashtra, too, in 2024 – the two had gone to polls together on 21 October 2019. He could also have advanced the Lok Sabha election by a few months to club it with the Assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram in November 2023. Or, the NDA-ruled Maharashtra and Haryana Assemblies could have been dissolved a few months earlier to club their elections with the parliamentary polls in 2024. Six months of power at the Centre or in a few states wasn’t such a big sacrifice or risk for the BJP. Because it would have placed PM Modi on such a high moral pedestal on the ONOE that it could corner the Opposition into submission.   

Besides, if PM Modi found ONOE so much in national interest, why should he fix 2034 for its rollout as suggested by the Kovind-led committee? Why not devise a way to implement it when you are at the helm? Why leave a potentially disruptive political move to your successor to deal with?

It’s like the women’s reservation in the Lok Sabha and the Assemblies. It will not be implemented as long as he is at the helm. Because it has been linked with the Census and the delimitation exercise. One doesn’t know when the Census will be conducted and whether delimitation will be carried out ahead of the 2029 general elections at all, given opposition from southern parties—including BJP’s crucial ally Telugu Desam Party—to population being its basis.

PM Modi has left another potentially disruptive move against patriarchy in politics for his successor to execute. 

Government’s move on ONOE

Returning to the ONOE, the two draft bills seem to be more like trial balloons at this stage. One of them is a Constitutional amendment. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) doesn’t have the numbers to push it through. It is reconciled to sending it to a joint parliamentary committee (JPC). The idea ostensibly is to initiate the process and bide an opportune time to steamroll it, if possible. These two bills aren’t enough to implement the ONOE though. More Constitutional amendments—including some also requiring ratification by states—will have to be brought. If the Opposition eventually manages to stall these bills, so be it. PM Modi will have a handle to beat the Opposition with. And if Amit Shah uses his magic wand to break the Opposition and get a section to side with it, nothing like it. The current leadership will then walk into history with the credit, leaving their successors to deal with the complexities in its implementation.

Why ONOE is bad for citizens

Both ONOE advocates and opponents have their arguments but neither side is addressing the most important aspect—citizens’ rights. Are the so-called advantages—financial or otherwise—of synchronised elections worth sacrificing the citizens’ rights and opportunities to keep politicians on a short leash? Give politicians a secure term of five years in power and see how they turn their back on voters for the next four years or so.

Take the case of demonetisation in 2016. When stories of hardships of millions of people standing in queues before banks broke out, the government went into a panic mode to address the problems. Because there were elections in five states two months later. Similarly, when the goods and services tax (GST) was rolled out in July 2017 and there were voices of discontent and anger from a section of the people, the government had to rush with remedial measures. Because there were Assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat a few months later.

I am not talking about the merits or demerits of demonetisation and GST here or how it worked in favour of or against any party in elections. What I am driving at is the fact that ‘one nation, many elections’ enable the voters to keep politicians and their parties in check. That’s how the people regularly vet their policies and politics and have a say in governance. You can trust ruling parties and politicians to forget accountability if they have to come to the people just once in five years and not every now and then. That’s why ‘One Nation, One Election’ is a bad idea.

There are two main arguments given in support of the ONOE. That it will save unnecessary expenditures on frequent elections and spur GDP growth that’s hampered by frequent enforcements of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The fact is that neither the government nor the Kovind-led committee has given any detailed account of the savings from simultaneous elections. The committee cites the Election Commission of India to peg the cost of simultaneous elections at Rs 4,500 crore. How much do segregated elections cost? No clarity.

This ECI figure found mention in a parliamentary standing committee report in 2015. In a discussion paper in 2017, NITI Ayog’s Bibek Debroy and Kishor Desai pegged the cost of election in 2014 at Rs 3,870 crore.

So, if you were to factor in the costs in simultaneous and segregated polls a decade back, the difference was of Rs 800 crore. Is Rs 800 crore such a big amount for a country like ours to sacrifice the citizens’ rights to reward or punish politicians in regular intervals?

The ECI said in its submission in 2015 that the cost of procuring additional electronic voting machines (EVMs) and paper-trail machines for holding simultaneous polls would amount to Rs 9,300 crore. It’s not a one-time expenditure. An EVM’s life is 15 years only—that is, Rs 3,100 crore per election on an average. Factor that and the cost-benefit analysis of simultaneous polls gets further skewed.

We don’t have any official figures about the total cost of the 2019 Lok Sabha election and the Assembly elections from 2014 and 2019, which could enable us to make this cost-benefit analysis in terms of expenditures. And, of course, we have no latest figures telling us how much we will save by synchronised elections today. It’s all about my word versus your word.

The Kovind-led committee report talks about how simultaneous elections would spur GDP growth. It suggests that due to frequent elections, the government ends up increasing revenue expenditures (read freebies), instead of focusing on capital expenditure. This argument has merits. But every single party is using ‘revdis’ in a big way now. What will stop them from taking it to a whole new level every five years? That’s like Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman arguing that the seven-quarter low of GDP growth in July-September 2024 period in the current fiscal was due to elections as there was no focus on capital expenditures. Let’s take it with a pinch of salt. If one were to buy her argument, it should have been limited to Q1. Was it the election hangover that slowed down the growth in the second quarter? 

Another argument is about the Model Code of Conduct hampering governance. It doesn’t. Nothing stops a government from carrying out its planned schemes and committed expenditures. Unless, of course, one is talking about the entire political executive getting busy in elections, bringing governance to a standstill. But Modi, Amit Shah and other central ministers don’t have to campaign in every Assembly and even municipal election. And, if the MCC is such a huge problem, curtail its period. For all one cares, do away with it. It’s becoming ineffective, anyway.

Opposition and ‘Modi phobia’ 

Having said that, let’s look at the Opposition’s stand against the ONOE. They talk about federal principles, violation of the will of the people, regional issues getting subsumed by national, and so on and so forth. You can always debate the merits and demerits of their arguments.

Let me start with the last point because many regional parties see it as a sort of conspiracy by the BJP to take away their advantage. The fact is that Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly gotten the better of the BJP, which contested on national issues and with Modi as the face in all election formats in West Bengal. Arvind Kejriwal has successfully blunted the BJP’s onslaught, centred on national issues, in Delhi Assembly elections. Hemant Soren did it in Jharkhand only last month. We are not even talking about regional players in South India.

Having said that, their apprehensions are not totally unfounded. Look at how the ‘Modi wave’ catapulted the BJP-led NDA to power in 21 states at one point of time. But a phenomenon like Modi comes only rarely.

In ‘normal’ elections, we have seen how the voters have begun to differentiate between national and Assembly elections and vote differently. There is no reason why they won’t do the same in synchronised elections.

The Opposition has a bigger issue that they never state publicly—the fear that the ‘Modi wave’ would give a huge advantage to the BJP, which may end up sweeping all elections and rendering the Opposition jobless for five years at least, to start with. Given that the Kovind-led committee has suggested 2034 as the timeframe for ONOE’s implementation, the Opposition must get rid of their Modi phobia—unless, of course, they see another BJP leader creating a similar wave in future.

Suppose there were simultaneous elections in 2024. The Opposition would probably be ruling in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Haryana, among other places, today, wouldn’t they? And that would have been with Modi as the BJP’s face. Well, this should be a good enough reason for them to stay positive. They should oppose the ONOE, but not because of ‘Modi phobia’. They should do it to uphold citizens’ rights to keep their rulers in check.  

DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)