New Delhi: While the Prime Minister’s Office held a meeting earlier this month to discuss the possibility of preparing a common voters’ list for elections to all local bodies, state assemblies and Lok Sabha – purportedly to pursue the BJP’s long-stated goal of having simultaneous elections – senior functionaries who have dealt with the issue earlier insist that this was never the objective.
Speaking to The Wire, Justice A.P. Shah (Retd), who was chairperson of the Law Commission in 2015, when it had endorsed the recommendations of the Election Commission to prepare such a common list, said, “We found that the ECI suggestions were workable. We thought that there was no point in repeating the recommendations, so some of the recommendations were simply approved by us.”
Law Commission had endorsed EC’s proposal
However, Shah noted that the proposal was endorsed only because it attempted to cut down on duplicity connected with the preparation of rolls by the Election Commission as also the state election commissions. The idea was never driven by the issue of having simultaneous polls, he said and added that several parties have reservations about this concept as they believe it would be used by the Centre to projecting its works and personalities and influence the outcome of state polls.
At best, he said, the Lok Sabha elections should be conducted at one point in time and all the state assembly polls simultaneously after a certain period of time. This, he added, would also ensure that our country does not remain in a constant state of polls, as many observers have pointed out.
Incidentally, the Law Commission’s 255th report had while dealing with and endorsing the issue of “Preparation and Use of Common Electoral Rolls” noted that “given that introducing common electoral rolls will require an amendment in the State laws pertaining to the conduct of local body elections, the Central Government should write to the various States in this regard.”
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It had also expressed “hope that the States will consider amending their laws based on the suggestions of the ECI and the Law Commission.”
CEC had first mooted the idea in 1991, EC followed up in 2004
Earlier, the Election Commission had twice recommended such common electoral rolls in 1999 and in 2004. When M.S. Gill was Chief Election Commissioner, a proposal was made in this regard to the then Prime Minister on November 22, 1999. Thereafter, in 2004, the then CEC T.S. Krishna Murthy reiterated the demand.
The Election Commission noted in 2004 that “superintendence, direction and control of the preparation and revision of electoral rolls for elections to the House of the People and the State Legislative Assemblies is the function entrusted to the Election Commission by Article 324(1) of the Constitution.”
Likewise, it said, “superintendence, direction and control of the preparation and revision of electoral rolls for elections to the Local Bodies has been entrusted to the State Election Commissioners by Articles 243K and 243ZA of the Constitution, as inserted by the Constitution (73rd and 74th Amendments) Acts, 1992.”
Stating that “most of the State laws provide that the electoral rolls prepared by the Election Commission for Parliamentary and Assembly elections should be the basis for the preparation and revision of rolls for local bodies elections”, it pointed out that in some states it is further provided that parliamentary and assembly rolls will be adopted in total for local bodies elections.
EC wanted to do away with confusion
At the same time, it noted that there are other states, where the parliamentary and assembly rolls are to be adopted only as draft rolls for local body elections and they are subjected to further modifications by way of inclusions and deletions.
This, it said, “not only creates confusion among the electors because their names may be present in one roll but absent in the other, or vice versa, but also results in duplication of effort and expenditure.”
So, the EC had stated that “it will be a huge national saving, if there are common rolls for all elections, and the Parliamentary and Assembly rolls are used for local bodies elections also, by being adopted and rearranged, by the method of “Cut and Paste” according to the wards or polling areas of the local bodies.”
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Move would impact at least ten states and one UT
Stating that “this may need some minor amendments to the local laws of the States concerned”, the EC had said that the move would “sub-serve great national interest of economy in government expenditure on elections”.
Incidentally, this move would, at present, impact the states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Odisha, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir that use their own electoral rolls for municipal polls.
Meanwhile, the Indian Express reported that a meeting on August 13 chaired by the principal secretary to the prime minister, P.K. Mishra, had discussed two options. The first was to bring a constitutional amendment to Articles 243K and 243ZA that would make it mandatory to have a single electoral roll for all elections in the country and the second was to persuade the state governments to tweak their respective laws and adopt EC voters list for municipal and panchayat elections.
The newspaper reported that others present at the meeting were cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba, legislative secretary G. Narayana Raju, panchayati raj secretary Sunil Kumar and three representatives of the EC, including secretary-general Umesh Sinha. It said Mishra asked the cabinet secretary to hold consultations with the states and seek their suggestions for further actions.
The report also cited a former CEC stating that the exercise may not meet with much success owing to the level of mistrust between the Centre and the states. He also referred to how the exercise would also involve technical issues since boundaries of the EC’s polling stations did not always match those drawn by the SECs for the municipal wards.