Drop the bad idea of simultaneous elections Premium

Simultaneous elections risk a blurring of the distinct forums and arenas of democracy in India

In recent weeks, there has been increasing discussion about the possibility of having national and State elections at the same time, popularly known as ‘one nation, one election’. The formation of a committee, helmed by a former President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, to determine how this might be implemented, and what manner of constitutional changes might be required to make it a legal reality, have generated further debate. The primary arguments in favour of simultaneous elections are twofold: first, that it will decrease the costs of conducting elections (and of electioneering); and second, that it will free up political parties from being in ‘permanent campaign mode’, and allow them to focus on governance (and, for that matter, constructive opposition) for a five-year period.

Against this, critics have pointed out that when you crunch the numbers, the actual financial savings are relatively minuscule. Furthermore, it is a relatively recent pathology of the Indian political system that central government Ministers and politicians spend a significant amount of time campaigning in State elections: if the concern, therefore, is that frequent State elections hamper governance and the business of Parliament, then simultaneous elections seem a needlessly complicated answer when a simple one is available: that State elections should be primarily fought by State party units, while national politicians can get on with the task of governance. The reality, however, is that the increasingly centralised — and presidential — character of Indian election campaigns means that this is unlikely to be a reality in the near future.

Critics of simultaneous elections have raised a few other objections. First, the logistical nightmare of conducting simultaneous elections in a country of a little over 1.4 billion people, in a context where even State elections need to take place in multiple phases.

The second, and graver concern, is the incompatibility of a rigid election timetable with some of the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy: as is well-known, at the time of Independence, central and State elections were conducted simultaneously. This arrangement broke down towards the end of the 1960s because of the use of Article 356 of the Constitution, which authorises the Union to suspend (or even dismiss) State governments in a narrowly-defined range of circumstances; but also, and apart from that, the essence of parliamentary democracy is that at all times, the government must enjoy the confidence of the House, failing which it must step down, and go back to the people for a fresh mandate.

Consequently, it is obvious that even if, legally and practically, one is able to synchronise central and State elections for one cycle, this will break down the moment a government falls. To this, two solutions have been proposed, both of which tend to make the problem worse. The first is that President’s Rule (i.e., central rule) will be imposed in that State until the five-year-period is over. Needless to say, this will starkly undermine both federalism and democracy. The second is that elections will be held in that State, but the term of the new Assembly will only be until the next cycle (which could be in a year, or three years, or four years). Not only does this undercut both the justifications for simultaneous elections — cost and an avoidance of continuous campaign — but, rather, leads to perverse incentives (for example, how much ‘governance’ will a State government be able to do if elections are scheduled in a year?).

The upshot of this is that there will be a strong push towards avoiding the fall of a government, even when it has lost the confidence of the House in the ordinary course of things. And, as we have seen in India, there is an almost institutionalised remedy for this: defections, or “horse-trading”. It is, by now, clear that the Tenth Schedule’s prohibition on horse-trading has been rendered more or less a dead letter, as politicians have found various ways to get around this (and courts have not been successful in stopping it). Thus, as was pointed out by lawyer and parliamentarian Kapil Sibal in an interview recently, simultaneous elections are likely to see an explosion of horse-trading, where the political parties with the biggest pockets will be the biggest beneficiaries.

While these intractable issues speak to the implementation of simultaneous elections, at a deeper level, there are two principled and interrelated arguments against the idea: federalism and democracy.