Simultaneous Elections to Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies

Simultaneous elections in Indian context refers to holding elections to Parliament and State Assemblies(SA) simultaneously. This  practice was discontinued some years after independence resulting in SA holding election during different time period.

Pros of Simultaneous elections

1. Allow government to focus on development as frequent elections leads to Governance Problem: Whenever elections are announced the normal work comes to a standstill to a considerable extent due to model code of conduct.This means that the government cannot announce any new schemes, make any new appointments, and the district administration machinery gets totally focused on elections.
2. Reduce expenditure on polls: Holding elections is a costly affair, so simultaneous elections will reduce the burden.
3. Allows leaders not to be always engaged in campaigning: Holding elections at one time will allow the political leaders to focus more on governance rather than on election campaigning.
4. Increase in voting percentage: This would lead to improvement in voting percentage as migrant workers would have to move back to home town only once for polling their vote.
5. Reduce money spent on manpower deployment: When elections are held separately, crucial manpower has to be deployed for prolonged periods on election duty. This idea will save the large amount of money spent on manpower deployment.

Cons of holding elections together:

1. Frequent elections are beneficial in number of ways as politicians, who tend to forget voters after the elections for five years have to return to them. This enhances accountability, elections give a boost to the economy at the grassroots level, creating work opportunities for lakhs of people.
2. This would lead to mixing of national and local issues and lead to distort priorities. In voters’ minds, local issues might overtake wider state and national issues or vice versa.
3. There are some Practical problems in implementing the scheme for example Imagine a scenario when the Lok Sabha gets dissolved too early (in 13 days, as actually happened in 1998), and for the sake of simultaneity all state assemblies with full or thin majority will also get dissolved. And then,if in the resultant Lok Sabha elections, the same party comes to power. This would be unfair to states.
4. The idea of simultaneous elections clearly goes against the constitutional structure of the Indian Parliamentary system. For eg Dissolution of state legislature before completion of 5-year term will break the cycle again thereby rendering the whole exercise futile.
5. Administrative hassles in managing all elections at the same time can leads to incidents of poll rigging and this will put heavy burden on the government in the fiscal year during which elections are conducted.

The idea is not bad overall but there are serious challenges in the implementation of one nation one election. There are some basic changes which need to be made in the Constitution apart from building a consensus on this issue.

By: Harman Sandhu