Antonio Diniz
The present government at the Centre after strongly advocating “One nation one tax” eventually managed to implement this much hyped and publicised policy decision last year “as one nation one tax but with many tax slabs”. Now the central government is again advocating a new proposal “one nation one election”, to which the Law Panel has already given its go-ahead signal.
Indeed this is a wonderful idea and will be a bold decision to hold both State Assemblies and Parliamentary elections simultaneously. Evidently this will save precious time, money, energy and men power deployment over and over again. Also much delay and administrative inactivity and inconvenience caused to general public due to perpetual election code of conduct will be minimised.
However coming to brass tacks, let’s not forget that India is a vast country with largest number of voters in the world having democratic form of elected government. Election involves huge preparation and logistics from the part of Indian Election Commission and other associated government agencies, police and paramilitary forces so that it can be conducted with utmost efficiency.
In reality, we have been witnessing of late that during elections in many states of the country, situations concerning the law and order issues are not that conducive to conduct voting peacefully on account of serious intimidation and violence unleashed by many groups opposed to each other.
In order to control this phenomena of unprecedented law and order problems paramilitary forces are deployed in large numbers almost in all the constituencies that have voting. Besides in large states elections are never held on the same day due to practical and logistic reasons and are staggered over several days to allow police and paramilitary forces time for planing and preparations in order to move to other places going for voting.
Since election can’t be held successfully on the same day even in one state with the exception of small states like Goa, then how can we advocate and implement successfully the slogan “One nation one election”?
However to be more realistic one thing that can be deliberated is to fix a definite period, say of one week to complete the entire election process. Thus doing away with the phenomen of country being in a constant state of election mode.
