Democracy, like a perennial river, has a natural course, which, when disrupted, could have consequences

The call of the hustings dreads India’s political parties and leaders who are forced to be on their toes when elections are around the corner. If in government, they rush up on their promises, placate the disgruntled citizens and convince voters that they are on the right track. 

Now sample this: a week ago, the Indian government announced a significant Rs 200 cut in the price of LPG cylinders. The Prime Minister described it as a Raksha Bandhan gift to women. The decision left many wondering why a government that is concerned about the women running households has left the prices of LPG, along with petroleum products, at the mercy of the international market. 

It is widely believed that the decision to cut the LPG prices was prompted by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s fear of an electoral backlash in the upcoming assembly polls in three states – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Besides fearing an encore of the Karnataka poll outcome, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership seems wary of the price subsidization that Congress-ruled states offered in order to cushion the spiralling LPG prices. 

Big ticket roll-backs on election eve have been a recurring phenomenon in Indian politics, and more so in recent times, the decision to withdraw the controversial farm laws being a prominent example. While the government ignored the farmers' protest for close to a year, the roll-back decision came weeks before the crucial assembly election in three states, with a formidable agrarian vote bank. 

Earlier governments too have played the roll-back game or delayed crucial decisions, like hiking prices of petroleum products, on election eve. 

A foregone conclusion from these trends is the fact that governments in power are wary of periodic or mid-term scrutiny of their governance record, be it through assembly elections in which the party in power at the centre has a stake or bye-polls in states. In both cases, the outcome could be seen as a referendum on the incumbent government’s performance. 

With ONOE, voters need not be placated for term

Three core contentions have been put forward by its votaries to support the One Nation One Election (ONOE) campaign: 

- that the country is constantly in election mode which impedes effective governance; 

- that elections around the year cost the nation a fortune;

- that the country had simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections from 1951 – 1967.

None of these contentions provides the logical muscle to alter the current course of India’s democratic evolution and customize it to fulfil any specific political agendas. 

Cost of democracy is not a burden: While various costs and its affordability are being talked about, the fact fundamentally remains that the cost of elections can only be seen as the cost of running, sustaining and maintaining democracy and its essentials. 

Over the years, governments have indulged in profligate spending of public money driven by their political agendas or extravagant expenditures, which, if accounted for, could often surpass the annual spending on running the democracy, through elections. 

The liberalization of the Indian economy initiated the era of rapid economic growth, greater investments, higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and a rise in incomes and wealth across the spectrum. But, more importantly, liberalization meant the government exiting from many sectors of commerce and business, and massive disinvestments in its public sector companies. 

Consequentially, the advent of high revenue models like Value Added Tax (VAT) and Goods and Services Tax (GST) brought a robust tax regime that substantially augmented the government’s coffers. The assumption was that the trimming of the government’s expenditure on key areas of infrastructural and commercial spending could create a surplus that could be diverted for social spending, which includes strengthening of the democratic processes as well.

However, the current government took a contrarian route by targeting the government’s social security expenditure. The decision to cut down on recruitment in government departments and organisations, with underlying slogans like “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance,” and the floating of the Agnipath scheme to drastically cut down on the defence pension bill were examples of targeted actions on public expenditure. 

For a government that has earned colossal tax collections in recent years, massively reduced its social security spending and significantly exited from commercial and infrastructural domains, the cost of conducting a few elections every year should hardly be of concern. 

Elections meant to strengthen governance, not disrupt: The contention that governance is being interrupted by constant elections is a troublesome and fallacious argument that is being increasingly perpetuated as a key political propaganda point. Such arguments hit at the very edifice and fundamental functioning of a democracy. 

Governance, after all, cannot happen as a closed-loop process. In a democracy, its conception and evolution are supposed to happen through extensive debate based on information sharing, social learning and forging consensus that could eventually culminate in policy making. An elected government is supposed to frame policies for the welfare of the people and in the national interest, while the opposition is supposed to be a corrective force that strives to ensure that the polity’s interest is safeguarded when policies are made. 

There is, however, no mechanism in Indian democracy, especially in its current form, to gauge whether either the government or the opposition is acting in the interest of the electorate. Independent India’s political history is rife with examples of major deviations from declared agendas and promises by ruling parties. Despite being a vibrant democracy, elections in India are not centered around manifestos with the electorate hardly sensitized or aware about their contents. 

This being the milieu, elections are the only means for the populace to express their approval for or resentment towards any specific policies or governance decisions. Restricting the opportunity for such expression every five years will amount to diminishing the efficacy of political accountability. 

For, by the end of the term, the electorate will be swarmed by several issues and political factors with many issues of past governance disappearing or losing primacy in public memory. 

Regular opportunity for electoral expression, in the current Indian context, happens to be the sole means to reflect public approval or disapproval of policies pursued by the incumbent governments, be it at the centre or the state. Hence, elections that are now followed as calendar events through natural political evolution are vital in enabling an efficient and accountable governance system, and ensuring that India’s ruling parties do not get a free ride while in power. 

Synchronising all elections into a once-in-five-year exercise will greatly erode this space for electoral expression, or sensing the mood of the nation, which, in turn, could undermine the credibility and vibrancy of the world’s largest democracy. 

Democracy evolves on its own: The history of the early years of independent India when Lok Sabha and state elections used to be held together has been taken up as a core contention by votaries of the ONOE campaign.

This is a very tenuous argument. The synchronized elections in 1951-52 were possible as this happened in the immediate years after India became a republic in January 1950. The shift from a constituent assembly to the parliamentary system, and the establishment of the federal structure required a synchronized election process to form the House of the People and the state assemblies in the early 1950s. 

The Indian National Congress was the dominant party then and a nationalist government with bipartisan participation was in place enabling general elections to the Union and the States in those early years of nation-building. The 1967 election was a landmark in the sense that it broke not just this cycle but also the political monopoly of the Indian National Congress over national politics and saw the emergence of regional parties that came to power in various states. 

As the grand old party, the Congress itself, in subsequent years, went through many splits and factions that led to the fall of numerous governments, both at the centre and the states, which led to hung legislatures, mid-term elections, alliance formations, the party hopping (Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram phenomena), horse trading and creation of the anti-defection law, among others. 

These are the ways in which Indian democracy has evolved in its seven decades as a natural exercise in the political evolution of the union. The effort to establish One Nation One Elections invariably emerges as an exercise to control and orchestrate this evolution to suit specific political objectives.    

Democracy not to be customized for political agendas

Considering that the core contentions for ONOE are unsound and could undermine the democratic foundations of the nation, it is worthwhile to understand why this plan with far-reaching consequences for democracy is so vigorously being pursued by the ruling front, that too with just a few months left for another crucial general election. 

As one political commentator remarked, it is about “changing rules to win” elections. 

Certainly, it is about winning elections and winning all elections in one go. The clear intention is to ensure that the anticipated repeat victory of Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Front Alliance (NDA) in 2024 or beyond should also mean a victory in a maximum number of states where the supposedly popular image of the prime minister will be pivoted more than the BJP’s organizational strength or ideology. It will mean that the vote for Narendra Modi for yet another term as PM should also translate as a vote for a BJP government in the states. 

While One Nation One Election was an idea that was being mooted by the ruling front from the time it came to power in 2014, the sudden urgency shown now, with just months before the 2024 general elections, which many anticipate might be preponed, could also be attributed to recent survey reports that uphold the prime minister’s continuing popularity among vast sections of people across the country. 

Albeit it is unlikely that ONOE will be implemented before the 2024 general elections, unless the committee headed by former president, Ramnath Govind, recommends an easier route to do so. Nonetheless, the long-term goal, expectantly, will be to ensure that most Indian states vote for the BJP in a synchronized general election that might happen in a few years wherein most states will go to polls together with, possibly a mid-term election to the Lok Sabha, in order to facilitate a truly ONOE.

Why the ruling front wants such uniformity and uninterrupted political conditioning for five years? 

First could be a political environment wherein governance plans go uninterrupted. While this looks like an ideal situation, one must remember that a government with a brutal majority in the Lok Sabha could comfortably usher in policy actions and transformations of major significance and far-reaching consequences, whether for good or bad. 

There are striking examples of recent years, like the demonetization decision in 2016 and the Agnipath in 2022, both of which were implemented by surpassing the Parliament. Even in instances like the controversial farm laws, the demand from the opposition to refer the laws to the parliamentary committees was overlooked and hastily passed in both houses. 

It took months of agitation by farmers on Delhi’s borders for the laws to be withdrawn. The significant aspect, however, is that the laws were not supposedly withdrawn as a result of the intense agitation, which the government tried to quell on numerous occasions, but clearly out of fear of setbacks in assembly elections to crucial states including Uttar Pradesh. 

These instances show that the ruling party clearly seeks a political environment wherein it has a free pass to implement policies and ‘reforms’ without the spectre of protests or having to compromise on account of impending state elections.  

The second aspect, thereby, will be the larger implications of allowing such a free pass wherein the ruling dispensation does not have to fear setbacks in state elections and also has a majority of states under its political control or influence. 

Such an environment will enable the ruling party to initiate transformations of a significant nature, including possible amendments to the Constitution, or its basic structure, including those that need ratification from a majority of the states. 

Fiddling with the democratic structures?

As a matter of fact, even the pursuit and implementation of ONOE will need considerable amendments to the Constitution. These include: 

Article 83 - Duration of the House, which states that “the House of the People (sic), unless sooner dissolved, shall continue for five years…..provided that the said period may, while a Proclamation of Emergency is in operation, be extended by Parliament.”

Article 85 - Sessions of the Parliament, Prorogation and Dissolution, which deals with the power of the President to summon a session of the Parliament, its prorogation and dissolution. 

Article 172 – Duration of the State Legislatures, which follows provisions like the House of the People, enshrining that State Legislative Assemblies “shall continue for five years…” and the period can be extended if a Proclamation of Emergency is in operation.

Article 174 – Session of the State Legislature, Prorogation and Dissolution, which like powers of the President for the House of People, in this case, provides the same powers of summoning the Assembly, its prorogation and dissolution to the Governor of the state. 

Article 356: Provisions in case of failure of constitutional machinery in states, or in other words, the imposition of the President’s rule in a state. 

While it is claimed in some circles that earlier Law Commissions were sceptical about the feasibility of synchronizing elections, the Law Commission constituted in 2018 by the present government had recommended such synchronization but also cautioned about extensive amendments that could be needed. 

The likelihood of such amendments realistically happening will depend on the mandates of the upcoming state assembly elections as well as the 2024 Lok Sabha election and the number of seats the ruling front manages to muster. Assuming that the NDA could repeat the spectacular performances of 2014 and 2019, and win many of the state elections, there will be the possibility of a synchronization exercise being initiated at the beginning of the new term. 

However, such an exercise might necessitate not just these amendments alone but also the exercising of some controversial constitutional provisions. These include the possibility of imposing the President’s Rule (in order to dissolve some state legislatures) as well as the proclamation of emergency (if needed to extend the tenure of the house/assembly to match the exercise). The other aspect is about how the amendments of the five Articles discussed above will be pursued and how the ruling party seeks to reframe them.   

What, though, is amply clear is that the implementation of ONOE will trigger a plethora of complexities, including the eventualities of state assemblies dissolved before term, in order to match either the mid-term or dissolution of the Lok Sabha. The spectre of imposition of President’s rule in cases of hung assemblies and a consequential gubernatorial reign over some states cannot be ruled out. 

Such eventualities raise questions on the necessity of such a complicated constitutional realignment exercise that has the potential to diminish political accountability and undermine the electoral leverage of the polity. 

The urgency shown for the ONOE plan and the inclination to execute it without considering the political consequences for the future of the world’s largest democracy indicates the desperation of the ruling front and some political objectives behind this exercise. 

That the ONOE plan portends implications for the future of democracy and the political character of the country is something that the electorate will have to consider when casting their votes in 2024.