Tandem polls a good idea, but tackle stability first

The Bharatiya Janata Party thinks that elections to the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabhas should be synchronised. Many speakers have approvingly quoted the late Nani Palkhiwala's dictum that polls are the heartbeat of a democracy, too many or too few are equally injurious to the body politic.

The reactions to this suggestion have been vehement. If I have read the media reports correctly, even the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and his colleagues are opposed; J. M. Lyngdoh has apparently said such a step could violate the Constitution.

I am not quite sure what the CEC meant. If memory serves me correctly, the first General Election was held in tandem with the first Vidhan Sabha polls. Surely our beloved CEC is not claiming that all those early elections were anything less than 'constitutional'.

Everyone knows the Congress did well in the Lok Sabha polls in the first General Election. But that success was not mirrored at the state level. In Madras, for instance, the party won only 152 seats in a House that then had a strength of 375, well under the halfway mark. In Bombay the Congress mustered the numbers but suffered the embarrassment of seeing its chief minister-designate, Morarji Desai, who had just taken over from the veteran B. G. Kher, lose his own seat. Obviously, the electorate was able to distinguish between Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha issues – and willing to act on those perceptions. Is the CEC claiming that in the 50 ensuing years the voters have lost this political sophistication?

Rather late in the day the CEC has offered the clarification that it will not be possible to hold Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha polls simultaneously because the EC simply lacks the resources – which shall enable rigging on a massive scale. This is nonsense!

For a long time now we have all got used to the idea that Lok Sabha polls cannot be held all over this country on a single day. We cannot even expect a single state to go to the voting booths on the same day because the EC needs to rush men from one place to the other to prevent untoward incidents. Bihar, to name the chief worry, must vote on at least three different days. But why should this prevent the voters in a given constituency from electing their chosen representatives to the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha on the same day? Or is it that the CEC suspects a dirty trick on the part of the BJP? After all, the Congress (I) has more ministries today than does the BJP.

That means Sonia Gandhi has more to lose because more of her governments will need to be dismissed abruptly if Assembly terms are to be synchronised with the next General Election.

A better argument against synchronisation would be that it would be something of a futile exercise. What is to stop the legislators from falling out with each other and pulling down a ministry? Haven't we seen just how easy it would be in Arunachal Pradesh? What happens if something like that happens, say, just one year after the new Vidhan Sabha has been created? Can we put everything in suspended animation, asking the voters to go without representation until fresh polls can be organised four years later to synchronise with the Lok Sabha election? If you ask me, this is the nub of the problem – the uncertainty caused by ambitious politicians who think nothing of pulling down a government to satisfy their own ends. And this certainly cannot be stopped by synchronising elections.

Actually, a solution was offered back in the turbulent period between 1989 and 1999 – when we had five General Elections in 10 years – but nobody has taken it up seriously thereafter.

The answer was that India should adopt the German law that no ministry could be voted out unless the same motion specified the identity of a successor. This will not prevent Arunachal Pr(CEC) adesh-style changes via wholesale defection, but that is another story altogether. I don't care what the CEC says, synchronised polls are a good idea in themselves – it saves money and gives governments a potential five years in power without needing to second-guess themselves constantly because of some major or minor polls. But synchronised polls cannot ensure stability – and that is the problem we need to tackle first.