With the constitution of a committee of seven chaired by former president Ram Nath Kovind to make recommendations on simultaneous elections at each of the three levels, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken the first step towards concretising an idea which had featured in the 2014 election manifesto of his party.
For the first time, an ex-president is chairing a panel on an intensely political and already decided issue. The pliable president has been a feature ever since Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, and endorsing the prime minister’s stand is constitutionally and politically problematic. Ram Nath Kovind, who joined the BJP in 1991 and has donated his ancestral home in Paraunkh to the RSS, became president at Modi’s behest. We have to wait to know the stand of the other seven.
Modi secured the recommendation of a parliamentary standing committee on the issue of simultaneous polls in December 2015. However, the committee had thought of streamlining elections into two phases – one concurrent with Lok Sabha elections, the other in the mid-term of the Lok Sabha, at two levels, not three. It considered such a reform ‘important for India’ to focus on the country’s development agenda to compete with other nations. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has responded positively. Now, the new panel is tasked with the legitimisation of simultaneous elections at the three levels of the Union, states and local bodies.
The separation
Indira Gandhi broke the simultaneity of elections after 1971 to neutralise the satraps in the Congress, and the decline of the party followed in 1989-1996. But the ‘one-party-dominant system’ and ‘the Congress system’ that functioned alternately in governance and the Opposition, despite the existence of several ideologically diverse dynamic parties, fractured. It caused instability in 1977-80, 1989-90, and 1996-99, until a federalised coalition system emerged as a bipolar/binodal configuration around the Congress and the BJP between 1999 and 2014. The 2014 and 2019 absolute majority for the BJP and a two-thirds majority for the National Democratic Alliance crushed the Congress, and Opposition strength contracted to a third.
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Ever since the 1967 elections, unstable coalition governments in the states didn’t last their term, and midterm elections were frequent until 1971, when the Fourth Lok Sabha was dissolved to hold a mid-term poll and the rupture in simultaneous elections was complete. In 1972, Indira Gandhi dissolved and reelected 18 Legislative Assemblies. The extension of the Lok Sabha for a year (1975-76), the dissolution of the state assemblies by the Morarji government in 1978, and Indira Gandhi returning the compliment in 1980, only intensified it. The following years witnessed an increasing scattering of the election process as the fracturing of the party system intensified since 1989; state/regional parties proliferated, consolidating in their strongholds and upping their stakes in New Delhi as they coalesced with national formations.
Elections in India have thus become year-round ‘event management’, a continual exercise that is the world’s biggest, especially counting local body elections. No wonder the 170th report (1999) of the Law Commission of India suggested comprehensive political, institutional and electoral reforms along with measures to ‘achieve the desired goal of one election for Lok Sabha and to all the Legislative Assemblies simultaneously.’
The proposal
A NITI Aayog paper in 2017 argued for ‘one nation one election’. It reasoned that since in the parliamentary system the legislative bodies do not have a fixed tenure, the two sets of elections could be synchronised in two phases between the 2019 17th general election and the midterm of the 17th Lok Sabha in 2021, by adjusting the tenure of legislative assemblies. In case of a midterm dissolution of the Lok Sabha, “there could be a provision for the President to carry out the administration of the country, on the aid and advice of his Council of Ministers to be appointed by him till the time the next House is constituted”. With the local bodies’ elections added this time in the suggested process, major constitutional issues are at stake in the initiative, whatever the proposed panel of loyalists suggests.
The Law Commission’s 170th Report, quoted to justify the NITI Aayog’s proposals, lays greater emphasis on the reform of the party system in the perspective of the proliferation and weakening of the parties and deinstitutionalisation of the party system. Anomalies in party funding and its impact on the electoral and political processes are highlighted and streamlining is suggested. If undertaken, these would strengthen the party system and remove causes of instability.
Experiences
The question is, what prompted PM Modi and the BJP to push for simultaneous election at full throttle? International and Indian experiences could provide possible answers, for the government’s rationale economics of elections, time management, better coordination and governance is not credible. Let us begin with the international experience.
Available evidence, particularly from the UK, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Germany, the US and Europe suggest that simultaneous elections yield more aligned results between national and regional elections. Simultaneous elections also appear to contribute over time to the nationalisation of party systems and bring greater cohesion in them. But on the contrary, in 2000 in Ukraine, with simultaneous elections, differences persisted at the two levels.
Also read: Simultaneous Elections to Parliament and Assemblies is Not Good for Democracy
The late scholar and journalist Pran Chopra suggested in 1999 that ‘simultaneous votes of no-confidence in the incumbent and confidence in the alternative’ would be ‘much safer’ and ‘would eliminate the need for a mid-term poll.’ Obviously, if the political reforms and institutionalisation of the party system is initiated by this government with the active support and participation of the Election Commission of India, the number of elections would certainly be reduced. In the interim, instead of the complex road-roller system proposed, elections to the Legislative Assemblies each year, as also to the Lok Sabha in the year it falls, could be clubbed, making the process annual. Slowly, but surely, simultaneity would emerge with stability in the system.
Ajay K. Mehra was Atal Bihari Vajpayee Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2019-21 and Principal, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Evening College, Delhi University (2018).