Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge on Sunday, September 3, slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government over the formation of a panel to examine the possibility of ‘one nation one election’, adding that the ruling dispensation wanted to slowly turn democratic India into a dictatorship. The government has formed an eight-member committee to examine ‘one nation one election’, with former President Ram Nath Kovind as its chairman and Amit Shah and others as its members.
“The Modi government wants democratic India to slowly turn it into a dictatorship. This gimmick of forming a committee on one nation one election is a subterfuge for dismantling the federal structure of India,” the Congress President wrote on Twitter. He added that to achieve this, there will be at least five Amendments required in the Constitution of India, and a massive change in the Representation of the People Act, 1951. “The Constitutional Amendments shall be required to truncate the terms of the elected Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies, as also at the level of local bodies, so that they can be synchronised,” he said.
The Congress President also posed a volley of questions to the BJP government on the same. “Without undermining the wisdom of any individual, is the proposed committee best suited to deliberate and decide on perhaps the most drastic disruption in the Indian electoral process? Should this huge exercise unilaterally be undertaken without consulting the political parties at the National level and at the State level? Should this humongous operation happen without bringing States and their elected governments on board?” he asked.
Kharge also pointed out that this idea has been extensively examined and rejected by three Committees in the past. “It remains to be seen whether the Fourth one has been constituted with a pre-decided outcome in mind. It baffles us that a representative of the prestigious Election Commission of India has been excluded from the committee,” he said.
“The fact that the cost incurred by the Election Commission in conducting all elections between 2014-19 (including Lok Sabha 2019) is around Rs 5,500 crore, which is only a fraction of the Government’s budget expenditure, makes the cost saving logic look like ‘penny wise, pound foolish.’ Similarly, if the Model Code of Conduct is the problem, it can be changed either by shortening the length of the moratorium or by relaxing the kinds of developmental activities permitted during the election season. All political parties can reach a wider consensus in this regard,” the Congress president said.
Kharge further stated that the BJP has a habit of overthrowing elected governments by disregarding the mandate of the people. “This has added considerably to the total number of 436 by-elections since 2014, for Parliamentary and Assembly Constituencies alone. This inherent greed for power in the BJP has already vitiated our politics and has rendered the anti-defection law toothless.”
He added that drastic actions like ‘one nation one election’ would sabotage India’s democracy, constitution, and evolved time-tested procedures. “What can be accomplished by simple electoral reforms would prove to be a disaster, like other disruptive ideas of PM Modi.”
Kharge said that till 1967, India neither had so many states nor 30.45 lakh elected representatives in Panchayats. “India is the world’s largest democracy. We have lakhs of elected representatives, and their future cannot be determined at one go, now,” the Congress president said. He said that for 2024, people of India only have one nation and one solution, that is to get rid of the BJP’s misrule.
Earlier in the day, echoing a similar sentiment Congress MP Rahul Gandhi wrote on Twitter, “INDIA, that is Bharat, is a Union of States. The idea of one nation one election is an attack on the Union and all its States.”