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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