New Delhi: The NDA government will implement “one nation, one election,” in its current tenure despite the BJP being in a minority, a top government functionary was quoted as saying on Sunday. He insisted that “there should be no confusion about the sthayi niti (policy stability) under a government elected for a third successive term after 60 years,” The Indian Express reported.
According to the functionary, there is no area where the NDA government, which completed 100 days of its third term Sunday, has not taken policy decisions to continue the work it had initiated 10 years ago: “Whether it is defence, space, external and home affairs, education, Digital India and making India a manufacturing hub, spending Rs 11 lakh crore annually on building infrastructure, mahila-yuva-garib-kisan (welfare of women, youth, poor and farmers), we are continuing with and taking forward the work that was started in 2014. Even our foreign policy has a reedh ki haddi (backbone) today, which it didn’t have under previous governments”.
Since he brought the BJP to power with a majority in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been advocating ‘One Nation, One Election,’ which means holding elections to Lok Sabha, all state Legislative Assemblies, and urban and rural local bodies (municipalities and panchayats) at the same time.
In his latest Independence Day address, too, he made a strong pitch for it, contending that frequent polls were creating hurdles in the country’s progress. A high-level committee, headed by former president Ram Nath Kovind, in March this year recommended simultaneous elections for the Lok Sabha and state assemblies as the first step followed by synchronised local body polls within 100 days.
This requires a Constitutional amendment but, as a first step, to hold the Lok Sabha and state elections together, a ratification by states will not be required for the amendment, once it is approved by Parliament. In the second step, elections to municipalities and the panchayats will be synchronised with elections to Lok Sabha and Assemblies in such a way that local body elections are held within 100 days of the elections to Lok Sabha and Assemblies. This will require ratification by not less than one-half of the states.
The Government had started preparations for conducting the Census, but a decision is yet to be taken on including a column on caste. “The process will begin soon” the source was quoted as saying. Notably, the decadal census was not conducted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Opposition has staunchly opposed the idea so far, red-flagging the constitutional issues. The challenges to its implementation would involve syncing electoral cycles with minimum disruption to governance and there is no clarity dealing with the breaks that would be involved in bringing all states on the same timeline. There is also a marked lack of clarity in the way forward in cases involving the dissolution of Houses, President’s Rule, or even a hung Assembly or Parliament, NDTV reported.
Regional parties have pointed out their limited resources could hamper them from highlighting local issues to voters, in the face of the din over the Lok Sabha election.
Another area of concern is the recurring cost of procuring EVMS, or electronic voting machines. This, the poll panel has said, will be nearly Rs 10,000 crore every 15 years, the report added.