Is ONOE just a grand distraction?

"Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”

Recalling these lines from Bertolt Brecht, Yogendra Yadav this week described the Union cabinet’s approval of ‘One Nation, One Election’ (ONOE) as a stamp on the ruling elite’s fantasy to “save the republic from the public”. The academic turned political activist refuses to call it a ‘middle-class fantasy’ because the wish to avoid a messy democracy is perhaps nursed by a small fraction of Indians — call them the elite 10 per cent.

The fact that consultations by the high-level committee (HLC) headed by former President of India Ram Nath Kovind were not broad-based enough for such an exercise is demonstrated by the fact that the website created for ONOE consultations was made available only in English and Hindi. Also, the HLC officially received only 21,000 responses by email, 80 per cent of which are said to have favoured the proposal.

The favourable recommendation was a foregone conclusion ever since the HLC was set up in September last year. Its members included Union home minister Amit Shah, Union law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, senior advocate Harish Salve (considered close to the ruling dispensation), former leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, former Lok Sabha secretary-general Subhash Kashyap and two former bureaucrats, N.K. Singh and Sanjay Kothari.

The then leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury declined the invitation to join the panel, saying, “I have no hesitation whatsoever in declining to serve on the committee whose terms of reference have been prepared in a manner to guarantee its conclusions.”

An editorial in the Indian Express observed: ‘The composition of the committee and terms of reference were so skewed that, with due respect to the former president, it was a rubber stamp in the thin garb of a committee discussing electoral reforms in the world’s most populous democracy.’ The absence of chief ministers or opposition parties from the committee smacked of predetermination.

In a letter to the HLC in January this year, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had urged it to abandon the quixotic project, pointing out that it was impractical and against federalism, a foundational idea of the Constitution. “Suppose simultaneous elections are held in 2024, and suppose the central government is defeated in February 2025 and the prime minister calls for fresh elections; or, suppose, on a major policy issue, the PM decides to seek a fresh mandate, will all the state Assemblies also be dissolved and ‘simultaneous’ elections held throughout the country?” he had asked.

The three basic reasons cited in the 280-page report supporting the proposal — voters’ fatigue, disruption in governance and high expenditure — have all been quite thoroughly debunked. Only the prime minister and the home minister are tired of elections because of their compulsive need to campaign even in municipal elections, said an acerbic Asaduddin Owaisi.

Yogendra Yadav was more scathing: “In the last 25 years of studying and researching for elections, I am yet to come across a single voter who is tired of voting.” In a lighter vein, former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi quipped that voters actually look forward to elections, because, as a witty woman had said to him in Chhattisgarh: “Chunav hota hai toh gareeb ke pet mein pulao hota hai (when elections come, the poor get fed pulao).”

Wayward references

The HLC supposedly studied electoral systems in other countries to arrive at its recommendation. It’s worth noting here that these countries — like South Africa, Sweden, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Belgium — are much smaller and arguably far more homogenous than India.

Critics of ONOE point out that conducting elections simultaneously can result in shrinking the democratic space for regional parties and their state-specific issues. It can, they argue, give large national parties an unfair advantage. When said national parties have disproportionately high resources and, consequently, the ability to amplify their own narrative and drown out or overwhelm the dialogue smaller players are trying to have with the electorate, they skew the whole democratic exercise of elections.

Would the BJP have won in the Odisha assembly election this year had it not been clubbed with the Lok Sabha election? Separate assembly elections bring state-specific issues to the fore; these are overshadowed when clubbed with the national election. Some commentators believe that the Biju Janata Dal may have done better, perhaps even won, if the assembly election in Odisha had been held separately.

A grand distraction?

A weakened BJP has been putting up a brave front but in recent months, it has been forced to cede ground on several schemes like lateral entry into the bureaucracy, the Broadcast Bill and the Waqf (Amendment) Bill. It also appears to have relented on the demand for the caste census. Is the green-lighting of ONOE a diversionary tactic to signal that it’s business as usual?

Political scientist Suhas Palshikar says it’s only the middle class that is favourably disposed to ONOE. This has perhaps emboldened the Centre to press ahead. Had it sincerely believed in its own rationale, the Maharashtra assembly could have been dissolved earlier this year and the assembly election held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha election. “The party could have demonstrated its intent and signalled that it was serious about ONOE,” says Palshikar. That it did no such thing says something.

The argument that ONOE will cut wasteful expenditure is even more questionable. Former secretary-general of the Lok Sabha P.D.T. Achary says: “[A sum of] Rs 466 crore was made available to the Election Commission to conduct elections this year. With states making their own allocations, the total figure could be pegged around Rs 1,000 crore. [On the other hand,] political parties are estimated to have spent close to Rs 1,36,000 crore. Whose money is being spent on elections? If at all the government is serious about reducing expenditure, will it agree to state funding of elections?”

The state-funding idea has been in circulation for a while. Several committees have weighed in on its merits, including the Indrajit Gupta Committee (1998), the Law Commission (1999), the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (2001) and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission (2008). All of them favoured state funding to ensure a level playing field for parties with less money. The question is: will the BJP agree?

Achary adds: “The ECI had estimated the cost of conducting the 2014 Lok Sabha elections with VVPAT machines to be about Rs 3,870 crore. In contrast, the BJP alone at the Centre received donations worth Rs 10,122 crore from 2016 to 2022, out of which Rs 5,271.97 crore came through anonymous electoral bonds”.

By way of comparison, the budget for renovating the Central Vista was Rs 20,000 crore, for erecting the Statue of Unity Rs 3,000 crore and the cost of building the new parliament building Rs 1,000 crore.

The actual cost of conducting the Lok Sabha elections once in five years is estimated to be just 0.02 per cent of the Union government’s budget, which the ‘dirty unwashed masses’ of India would argue is worthwhile for the only truly equalising exercise of their democratic rights.

Constitutional hurdles

There are procedural hurdles as well: not only is the ONOE proposal likely to be challenged in the Supreme Court, it will stutter in Parliament. In the present Lok Sabha, Achary points out, the BJP will need 362 votes while the NDA has 292 members in the House. In the Rajya Sabha, 162 votes will be required to get the bill passed.

In addition, synchronised elections are premised on at least five constitutional amendments — in Articles 83, 85, 172, 174 and 356, with at least 50 per cent of the states ratifying the amendment, as Article 174 deals with the dissolution of state assemblies and Article 356 relates to the imposition of President’s rule in the states.

Can this be worked out in the face of stiff opposition from non-BJP-ruled states?