The concept of ‘One Nation, One Election’ has stoked a debate in the country. This concept calls for a single election for state legislatives, Lok Sabha and Panchayats in a span of five years. The effect of such an idea has to be necessarily assessed with its degree of impact on the federal structure of India. It is supposed to bring a major reform in the electoral system and functioning of one of the largest democracies of the world. However, the complex and diverse political nature of our country poses a major challenge for adopting the system of simultaneous elections.

Concerns associated with current election system in India

• Financial costs and incalculable economic costs: The costs of conducting each assembly or parliamentary election are huge.
• It is estimated that the directly budgeted costs are around Rs 300 crore for a state the size of Bihar.
• Revision of electoral rolls is mandatory before every election: It implies that the teachers missing from schools and colleges.
• On election duty, the entire revenue machinery on election-related work, officers and vehicles of practically all other departments “requisitioned” for election duty.
• Economic costs of Model Code of Conduct (MCC): The works may have been announced long before an election is announced, but tenders cannot be finalised, nor work awarded, once the MCC comes into effect.
• The time overruns translate into cost overruns but the huge costs of salaries and other administrative expenditures continue to be incurred.
• Invisible cost of a missing leadership: The ministers are politicians, and politicians need to campaign, to select candidates, and to devise strategy for their party.
• The time for their ministerial duties reduces sharply, in spite of most of them putting in 16-18 hours of work each day. 
• Important meetings and decisions get postponed, with costs and consequences that are difficult to calculate.
• Diversion of security forces towards election duty: There are huge and visible costs of deploying security forces and transporting them, repeatedly.
• A bigger invisible cost is paid by the nation in terms of diverting these forces from sensitive areas and in terms of the fatigue and illnesses that repeated cross-country deployments bring about.

Arguments in favour of Simultaneous Election

• Principally an argument for efficiency: The argument is that the time lost to the model code would come down by implementing simultaneous polls.
• A parliamentary standing committee report on the feasibility of holding simultaneous elections argued that the imposition of the MCC puts on hold the entire development Programme and activities of the Union and state governments in the poll-bound states.
• Avoidance of policy paralysis: It was suggested that imposing a uniform calendar on elections for the Centre and the states and holding these synchronized elections every five years would avoid “policy paralysis" caused by elections constantly being fought somewhere.
• Consistency and continuity in governance: Free and fair elections are integral to democracy and continuity; consistency and governance are also integral to democracy.
• Holding simultaneous elections will ensure consistency, continuity and governance, and elections then will only be the means to achieve this and not an end in themselves.
• Strengthening democracy: A system must therefore be evolved to give a period of five years to the incumbent government to focus on governance.
• Curbing corruption: Simultaneous elections can also be a means to curb corruption and build a more conducive socio-economic ecosystem.

Arguments against Simultaneous Election

• Undesirable impact on voter behaviour: The data analysis shows that on average, there is a 77% chance that the Indian voter will vote for the same party for both the state and Centre when elections are held simultaneously.
• Simultaneous Polls will undermine Indian federalism: The elections are a check on governments in India and simultaneous elections would place less pressure on governments to work for the voter.
• It gives pole position to large national parties which govern and campaign at the Centre and in most if not all states.
• These parties would reap the economies of scale of one large election every five years, to the disadvantage of regional parties which campaign for Lok Sabha and assembly elections only in their own states.
• Dilution of regional issues with national ones: The opposition to the idea of simultaneous election was usually political as regional parties feared dilution of local issues with national ones.
• Against the grain of our Westminster-style federal political union: One nation, one election would make sense if India were a unitary state but we are a union of states, which is philosophically and politically an essentially different conception of the Indian nation-state.
• One nation, one election is anti-democratic: The synchronization of state election with centre would rob a state of one of the essential elements of Westminster democracy.
• It is inconsistent with the basic tenets of Westminster democracy, which are grounded in a government gaining legitimacy from one election to the next by being able to prove its majority.

Recommendations on Simultaneous Election

• First Annual Report of the Election Commission of India, 1983: It recommended holding simultaneous elections for the House of the People and the Legislative Assemblies of States:
• Considerable savings on the colossal avoidable administrative and other expenditure incurred on account of holding of separate General elections; and
• Substantial economy through revision of electoral rolls for the House of the People and the State Legislative Assemblies simultaneously
• 170th Report of the Law Commission of India: It noted that after 1967 holding of elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies simultaneously got disrupted due to frequent resort to Article 356 of the Constitution.
• It recommended that holding of separate elections to State Legislative Assemblies should be an exception and not the rule.
• 79th Report of Parliamentary Standing Committee, 2015: It noted several justifications for holding simultaneous elections, inter-alia as follows:
• The massive expenditure that is currently incurred for the conduct of separate elections;
• The policy paralysis that results from the imposition of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) during election time;
• Impact on delivery of essential services;
• Burden on crucial manpower that is deployed during election time; and
• Working paper by NITI Aayog

Road ahead

• Constructive vote of no-confidence: It is a concept where a government can only be voted out by a legislature only if the House has confidence in another government that can take its place.
• Lifetime of assemblies to coincide with Lok Sabha: The Union government has made another proposal which involves either extending or curtailing the lifetimes of state assemblies in order to make them coincide with the Lok Sabha elections.
• Logistics and resource requirement perspective: The ECI may need to mobilize significantly more resources considering the increased scope of elections in case simultaneous elections are implemented.

The resources would normally include:

• Polling officials for supervision and conduct of elections;
• Security personnel (Central Armed Police Forces, Armed Police Forces of the State etc.) to ensure safe, secure, incident free polls;
• Supply of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs including Control Units (CUs) and Balloting Units (BU)) for voting at each polling stations;
• Transportation and Storage of poll related materials i.e., EVMs, inks, paper for electoral rolls, VVPATs, digital cameras, video cameras;
• Transportation requirements of Election Commission officials and security personnel; and
• Strong rooms for storage of EVMs till counting and other resources as may be required.
• It is therefore suggested that a focused group of stakeholders comprising constitution and subject matter experts, think tanks, government officials and representatives of various political parties come together and work out appropriate implementation related details.

Note:

Amendments Required in case of Simultaneous Elections

• The policy of simultaneous elections is not possible in the current framework of the constitution, so we require some essential amendments in the constitution to implement this policy:
• Article 83 of the Constitution: Duration of Houses of the Parliament, we are required to fix the time and the tenure of the house of people.
• Article 85 of the Constitution: Sessions of the Parliament, prorogation and dissolution, there must be some guidelines for the dissolution of session; it must not be done on vague and ambiguous reasons. 
• Article 172 of the Constitution: Duration of the state legislature.
• Article 174 of the Constitution: Sessions of the Parliament, prorogation, and dissolution.