I am broadly in favour of simultaneous elections, which already places me outside the approved drawing-room consensus in Delhi. The fashionable response is to say that India is too diverse, too federal and too gloriously argumentative to vote on a common schedule. I find that argument romantic rather than rigorous. A democracy does not become less federal because citizens receive two ballot papers in the same season. Nor does an Assembly lose its constitutional importance merely because its campaign shares a calendar with a Lok Sabha election. What India does lose under the present arrangement is time: the attention of ministers, administrators, police forces and political parties is repeatedly pulled into campaigning somewhere. The country lives in an electoral waiting room, with every difficult decision judged against whichever state votes next.
The government deserves credit for moving simultaneous elections out of seminar halls and into legislative text. That is where a reform must eventually go if it is to be more than a television slogan. The two measures introduced in December 2024—the Constitution amendment and the companion Union Territories bill—were referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee rather than rammed through as an executive fait accompli. The framework is set out clearly in the PRS analysis of the Constitution amendment bill and the corresponding analysis of the Union Territories bill. Anyone declaring the proposal either a democratic miracle or a constitutional apocalypse should first read what has actually been drafted.
The permanent campaign has real costs
My support does not rest on the laziest claim made for the reform: that elections themselves are too expensive. Democracy costs money, and the official cost of polling is not large enough, relative to the size of India’s economy, to justify redesigning the Constitution by itself. PRS usefully notes that official expenditure on national and state elections was a small fraction of GDP. The stronger case is institutional distraction. Election duty removes teachers and local officials from ordinary work. Security forces are redeployed. Ministers become campaigners. Parties avoid candid policy discussion because every month offers another chance for a rival to weaponise a necessary but unpopular decision.
The Model Code of Conduct is often exaggerated in this debate. Existing projects do not legally stop merely because a poll has been announced. Yet anyone who has worked around government understands the difference between what a rule formally permits and what an anxious bureaucracy will approve. Officials postpone files rather than risk accusations. Political executives prefer announcements after polling. Contractors wait for clarity. The resulting hesitation is not total paralysis, but it is a recurring governance discount. A common cycle would give governments longer stretches in which administration, rather than campaign choreography, occupies the centre of public life.
There is also a democratic benefit that critics understate. Permanent campaigning rewards parties with the deepest treasuries, the largest media machinery and a leader who can remain perpetually airborne. It does not automatically strengthen local democracy. Smaller parties must repeatedly raise money, assemble workers and negotiate alliances. Voters endure rallies and promises without receiving proportionately better scrutiny of their representatives. A single, predictable cycle could encourage parties to invest in organisation and policy between elections instead of treating politics as an endless sequence of war rooms.
The draft’s weak points are not imaginary
Supporters should not pretend that the present bill is perfect. Its most awkward feature is the proposal that a Lok Sabha or Assembly elected after premature dissolution would serve only the remainder of the common cycle. That could produce a legislature with a term of less than a year. I understand the logic: without a remainder-term rule, synchronisation would collapse after the first political crisis. But asking citizens to conduct a full election for a government that begins life as a short-lived caretaker is constitutionally possible and politically strange. It may depress participation, encourage gimmick spending and make serious administration nearly impossible.
The government should therefore consider a constructive-vote-of-no-confidence mechanism, under which a government can be removed only when an alternative majority is simultaneously demonstrated. Germany uses a version of this idea, and India already values stability in several institutional contexts. It would not eliminate early dissolutions, but it would reduce collapses caused by tactical defections or opposition coalitions that agree only on removing the incumbent. If the reform seeks stable cycles, it should address the cause of avoidable dissolution rather than merely prescribe an oddly abbreviated election afterward.
I am more troubled by the provision allowing an Assembly election to be deferred on the Election Commission’s recommendation without a sufficiently detailed statutory test or firm deadline. PRS correctly points out that the bill leaves unanswered what happens if an Assembly’s term expires while its election remains postponed. That is not a minor drafting quibble. Elected state government cannot be left in constitutional mist. The legislation should specify narrow grounds, require a published explanation, impose a short outer limit and provide parliamentary or judicial review. A pro-reform position does not require me to approve ambiguity precisely where federal legitimacy is most sensitive.
Congress should argue the text, not invent a coup
The opposition’s strongest case lies in these design questions. Unfortunately, Congress and much of the INDIA alliance often prefer a more melodramatic claim: simultaneous elections are supposedly a plot to convert India into a presidential system and erase regional voices. I do not buy it. Voters routinely distinguish between levels of government, and Indian electoral history offers abundant split verdicts. A citizen capable of choosing one party for a municipality and another for Parliament does not become hypnotised because the ballots arrive during the same month.
Regional parties could even benefit from predictable coordination. They would know the national campaign calendar years ahead and could force larger parties to negotiate before, rather than after, elections. The claim that one common schedule necessarily nationalises every issue also underestimates India’s political diversity. Tamil Nadu will not stop debating language, Punjab will not stop debating agriculture and Odisha will not stop judging state-level delivery because national television simultaneously discusses foreign policy. Campaigns overlap already; the reform changes timing, not the intelligence of voters.
Congress-era nostalgia is especially unhelpful here. Simultaneous elections were not invented by the Modi government; Lok Sabha and Assembly polls were commonly aligned during the republic’s early decades. The cycle broke because legislatures fell early, not because the Constitution discovered a sacred principle requiring elections every few months. There are legitimate reasons not simply to recreate the 1950s arrangement, particularly the expansion of regional politics. But opponents cannot describe the very concept as alien to Indian democracy without rewriting history.
Pass a defensible reform, not merely a memorable slogan
I want the government to persist, consult state parties seriously and amend the bill where criticism exposes operational risk. It should publish a transition calendar, clarify the treatment of hung houses, strengthen the Election Commission’s accountability when polls are deferred and build protections against terms so short that elections become ceremonial. Local-body elections should be handled carefully too; forcing every municipal contest into one national spectacle may create logistical congestion instead of relieving it.
The case for reform remains stronger than the case for inertia. India’s current system was not divinely designed. It emerged from political accidents and now encourages a culture in which governing is the interval between campaigns. Still, a reform advertised as an efficiency measure must be engineered with unusual constitutional precision. The government has the right instinct and, so far, the courage to put a difficult proposal before Parliament. Its next achievement should be to absorb good objections without surrendering the central idea. One Nation, One Election will persuade more Indians when its supporters stop treating every amendment as betrayal and its opponents stop treating every administrative reform as dictatorship.
I would vote for the principle. I would also insist on changes before the final vote. That combination should not be difficult to understand, although our political culture increasingly treats qualified support as a software error. Simultaneous elections can make government more continuous, campaigns less exhausting and public administration more predictable. But predictability must not come at the price of unreviewable discretion or legislatures too brief to govern. The BJP should aim higher than winning this argument. It should produce a law durable enough to survive a future government it does not control. That is the proper test of constitutional reform—and the surest rebuttal to those who insist the proposal serves only today’s ruling party.
