Watch Nidhi Razdan: India debates ‘One Nation, One vote’

Gulf News

In true style that has become the hallmark of the Modi government, last week the centre suddenly announced that it was setting up an eight member committee to look at a proposal that will fundamentally alter India’s federal democracy - ‘one nation, one election’. Which means holding all local and state polls along with national elections.  The announcement about the committee came soon after the government sprung another surprise- a special session of Parliament to be held from the 18th to the 22nd of September.  Read the full story here: https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/indias-one-nation-one-election-move-what-lies-ahead-1.1694086083276  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km  Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV  #UAEnews #India #IndiaElections

Transcript

00:00Is the Government of India planning to bring in a bill to have simultaneous elections to

00:09Parliament and State Assemblies?

00:11That's the big question, as Parliament gets ready to meet for a mysterious special session

00:16later this month for five days, whose agenda is still not known.

00:20Now, the idea of a one-nation, one-election is not new.

00:24It's something that actually used to happen in India till about 1967.

00:28And it's something the BJP has been talking about since the last decade or so.

00:32The Law Commission of India has gone into this question more than once.

00:36So has the government's think tank, the Neti Aayog.

00:39And one of the things that is clear is that it will require a lot of changes to the Constitution.

00:44It will require possibly the ratification of at least 50% of states and a lot of expenditure

00:51on the Election Commission's behalf in order to get all the infrastructure in place.

00:55So it's not something that can be rushed through exactly.

00:58But what regional parties are saying and what their concern is, that this is in a sense

01:03a bid to centralise power by the BJP, simply because the BJP's calculations are that if

01:09it's able to hold Assembly polls along with national polls, that any sentiment that is

01:15there for the BJP, for the party in favour of Mr Modi, will also translate into the way

01:20people vote at the state level.

01:23Now, we have to test that theory about whether that's actually true, but the fact is that

01:27having simultaneous polls does give national parties a big edge over regional parties.

01:33And that means the idea of holding polls together in this way actually goes against the federal

01:38spirit of the country.

01:40Those who say that this is being done to curb expenses and to ensure that projects go on

01:46uninterrupted by a model code of conduct, well, there are solutions that can be found

01:50to that and to those issues specifically, you don't need to have one nation, one election

01:54in order to do that.

01:56But for now, we'll have to see whether the BJP does indeed push this through, because

02:00most regional parties will oppose this for their own survival.

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