One Nation One Election

Naman Shukla 

author of this blog is an Advocate at Delhi High Court.

"‘One Nation One Election’ means conducting elections for Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabha and local bodies elections at the same time. In India at present Loksabha elections and 4 Vidhan Sabha elections are held together earlier 5 but in 2018 Telangana Government under the TRS called for an early election but majority of states have Vidhan sabha elections at different time periods."

There are some pros and cons of the ‘One Nation One Election’ concept:

Pros:

If the words of our Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi are taken into consideration that there should be one nation one election is implemented then we can reduce the campaigning time and excessive expenditure.

This initiative will be found to be beneficial in the terms of monetary aspects. The expenditure has been done for the elections by the central government for the purpose of campaigning and to run various kinds of rallies around all over the country lead to the expenditure of huge amount of money from the funds. 

Saving money is one of the biggest mottos considered by our Prime Minister. Through the execution of this lot of expenditure of funds can be prevented. Running through the statistics the first Lok sabha and Vidhan sabha election held in the year 1951 and 1952 were around ₹10.45 crore for Lok sabha election.

In 2014 general election almost ₹3,870 crore were spent and in 2019, there was 40% jump from 2014 costing on unprecedented ₹50,000 crore ($7 billion), according to New Delhi based centre for Media Studies.

The spent amount from the funds can be utilise for many other purposes like to increase the economy of the country, women empowerment, poverty alleviation, education, farmers and for the developmental purposes.

Frequent elections disrupt normal public life. As the frequent election consumes a lot of the time of the public and its officials who are appointed to carry out the voting procedures and CRPF who are appointed for at least 2-4 days in order to maintain the security of the particular areas where the election is going to be held.

Cons:

The framers did not opt for a single election for the entire country or an unbreakable tenure for the

government in the centre and states.

One election for both Lok sabha and Vidhan sabha will be against the parliamentary democracy and

federalism or this will be a distorting element.

One Nation One Election will become the distortion of federalism which resides to beside the people

of India.

Citizens have the opportunity to choose the government for their state if they were not satisfied with

the work of central government.

This clause has been rendered by first committee held of the law-making authority the founding

fathers of the Constitution of India. In which it was stated that one election for both the houses will

take the parliamentary democracy.

In order to have simultaneous election it is absolutely necessary to have the election after each 5

years of the tenure of the present government.

If both the elections are held simultaneously then local issues will be subsumed under the National

Cases.

One Nation One Election will also lead to the National Political Parties getting the bigger share

of the political pie. Given their financial powers and organisational strength the big parties will run

over small ones.

Suggestions:
Instead of ‘One Nation One Election’ there should be ‘One Nation Two Houses Two Elections’.

At a time, there should be an election for Lok Sabha and after two years the election for Vidhan Sabha
must be held for the complete states of India together.

This will reduce the expenditure which occurs at the time of Vidhan Sabha election in each and every
state at different times.

The valuable time of the government and of the people of India will be saved and lead to less chaos
which generally occurs at the time of elections.

This will even not lead to the disruption of parliamentary democracy and federalism also.