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Saturday, August 4

31 SIMULTANEOUS ELECTIONS IN INDIA - PROS & CONS




31 SIMULTANEOUS ELECTIONS

A.) Introduction: Meaning of Simultaneous Election
Simultaneous elections should imply that elections to all the three tiers of constitutional institutions (Lok Sabha, State Legislative Assembly and Local Bodies) take place in a synchronized and co-ordinated fashion. What this effectively means is that a voter casts his vote for electing members for all tiers of the Government on a single day.

B.) Reason for Supporting Simultaneous Election
The key adverse impacts that the existing electoral cycle leads to could be broadly categorized into the following:
1.       Impact on development programs and governance due to imposition of Model Code of Conduct by the Election Commission
2.       Frequent elections lead to massive expenditures by Government and other stakeholders
3.       Engagement of security forces for significantly prolonged periods
4.       Other Issues
a.       Frequent elections disrupt normal public life: Holding of political rallies disrupts road traffic and also leads to noise pollution.
b.      Frequent elections perpetuate caste, religion and communal issues across the country.
c.       Frequent elections adversely impact the focus of governance and policy making: Need to win the next impending election makes short-term political imperatives an immediate priority. As a result, sound long-term economic planning often takes a back seat.

C.) How it will violate basic principles of Constitution

Principle of Accountability:
1.       The legislature shall be accountable to elected representatives. Supporters of the measure often point to simultaneous elections until 1967. But it is often forgotten that those simultaneous elections were not constitutionally mandated; they occurred simultaneously only because historically, electoral competition with adult suffrage formally took off at the same time at the national and state level and for the first two decades, electoral mandates for national and state legislatures ordinarily remained stable (barring in Kerala). In other words, simultaneous elections were not a principle but a function of historical coincidence and initial political stability.
2.       The implication of simultaneous election would be that a government cannot be removed, however anti-people or under-performing it may be, or in spite of being hopelessly in a minority, if the Opposition is not united enough on an alternative to replace the existing ministry.

Role of President:
NITI Aayog mentions, if the mechanism of confidence vote fails and the Lok Sabha is to be prematurely dissolved, then, instead of fresh elections, if the period is short, the president can carry on the administration with advice from a council of ministers (which obviously does not have the support of the legislature). This would be the most blatant violation of the principle of responsible government and such a proposal is nothing short of rewriting the Constitution via a back door and bringing in of the provision of “president’s rule” at the national level. It would also accord to the president an unreasonably wide discretion of appointing such an interim, non-responsible government.

Constitutional Protection of 5 Year Tenure of an elected Legislature:
Three, if the legislature is to be inevitably dissolved with a larger portion of the five-year term still remaining, then it is suggested that fresh elections are held but the legislature shall not have the full five-year term; instead, it would have a truncated term that remained from the previous legislature’s term. This would jeopardise the constitutional protection that a legislature, once elected, gets a five-year term.

D.) Way Forward
Are there no other solutions avoid the key adverse impacts that the existing electoral cycle?
1.       If expenditure is an issue, that logic would finally take us to the argument that elections are expensive and hence problematic.
2.       If the interference of the model code of conduct is an issue, political parties need to impose self-regulation when in power and ensure that the boundaries between rightful and legitimate decision-making and wrongful advantage of positions of power to win votes are strictly and legally defined.
3.       If black (illegal) money is the problem, then it can hardly be addressed by this measure; changing both laws and practices involving electoral finance will be the best route to adopt. (660 Words)

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Idea of One Nation, One Election has been repeated from various public platforms on a number of occasions. Four reasons are usually cited: massive expenditure; diversion of security and civil staff from primary duties; impact on governance due to the model code of conduct, and disruption to normal public life.

B.) Argument against it

Cost Factor: Elections cost 0.05% of India’s total expenditure: The Election Commission incurs a total cost of roughly Rs. 8,000 crore to conduct all State and federal elections in a span of five years, or roughly Rs. 1,500 crore every year. Nearly 600 million Indians vote in India’s elections, which means, it costs Rs. 27 per voter per year to keep India an electoral democracy. Is this a “massive” expense? To put this in context, all the States and the Centre combined incurred an expenditure of nearly Rs. 30 lakh crore in FY2014. Surely, 0.05% of India’s total annual expenditure is not a large price to pay for the pride of being the world’s largest and most vibrant electoral democracy. The notion that elections are prohibitively expensive is false and misleading.

Code of Conduct: The model code of conduct for elections was agreed to by political parties in 1979, and prohibits the ruling party from incurring capital expenditure for certain projects after elections are announced. If India is indeed embarking on a path of “cooperative federalism” as the Prime Minister also claims, then more such projects will be undertaken by each State and not by the Centre. So, why should elections in one State hinder governance in the rest of the States? And if all political parties still feel the need to reform the code, they are free to do so. The solution is to reform the code and not the electoral cycle.

Diversion of civil staff and disruption of public life were the two other reasons cited, but these sound more like reasons against holding elections in general. Surely, a disruption to public life twice in five years is not a binding constraint in the larger interests of interim accountability.

Voter Behaviour: There is clear empirical evidence that most Indian voters tend to choose the same party when elections are held simultaneously to both Centre and State, with the relationship diminishing as elections are held farther away.

Federal Political Autonomy: Further, simultaneous elections impinge on the political autonomy of States. Today, any elected State government can choose to dissolve its Assembly and call for fresh elections. If elections are to be held simultaneously, States will have to give up this power and wait for a national election schedule. There can be legitimate reasons for State governments to dissolve their Assemblies and call for fresh elections, as should be the case in Tamil Nadu. Under a simultaneous elections regime, the State will be beholden to the Union government for elections to its State, which goes against the very grain of political autonomy under our federal structure.


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