THE BJP national executive which met last week has called Prime Minister Narendra Modi's proposal for simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and state legislatures "another path breaking initiative". This is hardly surprising considering that the BJP election manifesto had called for simultaneous elections.

Modi has put out this proposal as part of a package for electoral reforms. Last September, President Pranab Mukherjee had endorsed the idea. The reasons advanced for holding elections together are to reduce State expenditure on elections; to ensure better governance uninterrupted by continuous elections and providing stability to the political system. There are some who even want the panchayat elections to be held alongside the central and state legislature polls.

There have been objections which are technical in nature like pointing out the huge number of electronic voting machines that will have to be manufactured and deployed and the non availability of security forces for such a large exercise.  But the real objection is that this move will be profoundly anti-democratic and will damage the party based parliamentary democratic system.

Simultaneous elections are possible only if there is fixity of tenure for five years for both the Lok Sabha and state assemblies. This means there can be no mid-term dissolution of legislatures. How can this be achieved?  If a government loses its majority in the house, then there has to be a constitutional provision barring the dissolution of the house and providing for another government to be formed which has no relation to the mandate of the people. Or worse, there would be a period of Presidential rule in the state concerned, till the five year term is over.

Such devices to prolong the life of the legislature and the Lok Sabha, or, the government, militates against the very principle of party based parliamentary democracy and the accountability of the executive to the legislature.

In the case of state legislatures and state governments, the central government would have enhanced and arbitrary powers to interfere with the democratic mandate of the people. It would strike at the root of the federal structure.

At the central level, what it would amount to is to truncate the executive's accountability to parliament and the latter' accountability to the people. If a prime minister loses the confidence of the house, and there is no one else who can muster a majority, by this notion of fixity of tenure, a coalition government will have to be formed which will have no relation to the electoral mandate of the people. Neither can the leader of a ruling party which commands a majority in the house recommend dissolution of the Lok Sabha and go for seeking a fresh mandate.

One cannot forget that the dissonance between holding state assemblies and Lok Sabha polls began with the use of Article 356 to dismiss the first Communist ministry in Kerala and the imposition of President's rule there in 1959. So in the 1962 general election, the Kerala assembly election was not held together with the Lok Sabha polls as the assembly polls had been held earlier in 1960. Since then, repeated misuse of Article 356 by the centre led to various state assemblies having different periods of tenure.

As long as Article 356 remains in the statute book, the capacity of the centre to use it as a political weapon in the name of maintaining fixity of tenure and installing an alternative government will  be enhanced. Further, the attempt to straitjacket simultaneous elections would mean having to cut short the life of some of the existing state legislatures, which would be patently undemocratic.

India has 29 states with widely varying political and social conditions. The attempt to enforce an undemocratic uniformity is the favoured ideal of the RSS-BJP combine. The concept of "one country, one election" is similar to their slogan of "one nation, one language, one culture". Such authoritarian prescriptions should be rejected, if democratic and federal principles are to be preserved.

(January 11, 2017)