by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
India is a nation with its carnival of elections. The Lok Sabha election is a colossal affair that involves a population nearly a seventh of humanity. Yet it does not speak the last word even for a year or two. In 2014, the consummate victory of BJP under Narendra Modi kept doubts and disgruntlement on a low key. But that was only for a while. The very next year, in the city state of Delhi, the fiercely anti-BJP Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) swept the 70-member assembly, grabbing 67 and leaving only three seats for BJP. The BJP succeeded in grabbing Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra (with Shiv Sena help). But after a few months, in the crucial state of Bihar, it was repeated. RJD chief Lalu Yadav and incumbent chief minister Nitish Kumar, sworn enemies over a decade, made friends; their alliance trounced BJP. All this led to an unprecedented national mood-swing to the detriment of Modi, holding up his reform plans and denting his authority. Is it good for democracy, or not?
One argument is that the division of power in a democracy is all about checks and balances, and, being so, it is perhaps good for the nation to keep the party in power accountable throughout its tenure, with the series of assembly elections being a way of keeping it on the edge. On the flip side, though, it invites too much discordance for the Central government to carry out its mandate, leading ultimately to ‘policy paralysis’, the malady that plagued the previous UPA-II government. Democracy, like the judicial system, is certainly adversarial at its core. But for a government to perform it needs consensus, which an unending procession of elections can disrupt.
This February-March, there will be elections, not only in the mega-state of Uttar Pradesh but in six more, including Punjab and later this year in Gujarat.
The 2018 calendar too is ‘eventful’, with elections due in Congress-ruled Karnataka and the BJP-ruled Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Even in 2019, when the next general election is due, as many as eight states, including key states like Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, will have their assemblies re-elected. There is no guarantee that all the elections will be synchronous. The cycle of elections got disrupted in the late Sixties, with the rise of anti-Congress parties across north India leading to dissolutions of legislative houses at the Centre and states. It is now like a clock that has its movements gone haywire. They must be reassembled if the clock has to tick on.
Efforts towards it are in progress, though there is no consensus in sight. The government now seems willing to go by the decision of the parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, headed by Dr. E. M. Sudarsana Nachiappan (Congress), which has made the following recommendation: that elections be held in two phases, first, that of some legislative assemblies bunched together around the mid-term of the Lok Sabha, and the rest of the assemblies going to poll at the end of the Lok Sabha’s term. The idea is to club together all state assemblies going to poll in a span of six months to one year. If, for instance, such a law were already in place, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra would have gone to poll in sync with 2014 general election, and Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Punjab, Tamil Nadu. Puducherry etc. were to hold elections on a fixed date (or dates) this year.
It also implies that a good many states in which polls are due in 2018 must wait for up to a year if their elections are to synchronise with 2019 general election. On the other hand, to make elections simultaneous, it may be necessary to shift the timing of Lok Sabha elections too.
All this require amendment to Article 83(2) providing for a term of five years for the House of the People, and Article 172(1) providing for a five-year tenure for the legislative assemblies from the dates of their first sitting. The Committee has recommended that in order to hold early elections to Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies, one of the two conditions must be met: (a) a motion for an early general election must be passed by the House, or (b) a no-confidence motion must be passed by the House, with no alternative government being passed, with no alternative government being elected within 14 days. Dr. Nachiappan’s party, Congress, is not in favour of the changes on the ground that these are “impractical, unworkable and can lead to a scenario where the necessary balance in the Indian democracy given the diversity of the country is lost”. Now the Congress has suggested that there should be a Constitutional amendment bill if Modi wants his wish to be implemented.
The liberal camp views the move with apprehension. It smells a political motive. It is generally believed that when elections are held together voters act similarly. Popular wisdom, though, is that Indian voters are “astute” enough to distinguish between voting for government at the state level and that at the Centre. But IDFC Institute, a Mumbai-based think tank, has, in a research paper, has established, based on data since 1999 elections, that there is 77 per cent probability of an Indian voters preferring the same party at the Centre and state if elections are held simultaneously. So there may not be much evidence in support of our voter’s fabled “astuteness”.
Interestingly, the Election Commission of India and President Pranab Mukherjee have also come forward to support the government desire to hold simultaneous polls.
But the core problem for Modi is to persuade the non-Congress opposition to come on board. Modi succeeded in getting all including Congress together on the GST issue as it was to benefit all. But the opposition suspects simultaneous poll to be a ruse to shrink the space for making up in the subsequent innings.
