Why would someone, particularly an enormously successful politician, want deliberately not to play up to his strength, was the question that struck me as I heard Narendra Modi forcefully making a case for simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha and state Assemblies in a recent interview. Electioneering has been one of the two major preoccupations in his tenure so far, the other being foreign visits. And, despite the reverses in Delhi and Bihar last year, no one comes within a mile of him as a campaigner. Mr Modi's ostensible logic that this idea would save costs and pave the way for uninterrupted governance remains just that, ostensible. The fact that the Prime Minister was following an idea first mooted by Lal Krishna Advani added to the intrigue, because that old warhorse is not exactly Mr Modi's go-to person on any issue.
Then the penny dropped. One must ask the classic Latin question, cui bono (who benefits)? Notwithstanding the handed down wisdom that the great Indian electorate votes differently in state and national polls, the ground reality is that whenever the general election coincides with that for some state Assemblies, the trends converge. In 2014, the Biju Janata Dal won Odisha by a landslide and cornered the lion's share of the Lok Sabha seats from the state. The Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in Telangana enjoyed the same good fortune. The big loser in the three states was the poor old Indian National Congress, which also lost miserably across the nation. Similar patterns can be discerned in earlier elections as well. The dissolution of state Assemblies following the thumping victories of the Janata Party in 1977 and the Congress in 1980 resulted in spectacular wins for them in the states as well. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand following the 2014 general election. All this further validates the convergence hypothesis.
Had all state Assemblies gone to polls in 2014, surely the BJP would have won handsomely in the states where it prevailed in the national elections. It would have avoided the ignominy of Delhi and Bihar in 2015. It would have also had in its kitty Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, and the biggest bonanza of all, Uttar Pradesh. The Congress cup of woes would have run over with a rump presence solely in the Northeast. The poll-savvy BJP top leadership - read Mr Modi and Amit Shah - could have hardly failed to realise this.
If such electoral behaviour holds in future elections, and there is no reason to believe it will not, only one party will benefit, no prizes for guessing which. With the Congress in decline, possibly terminal, the opposition space is scattered among regional satrapies and the Left, which is now confined to at most three states. Only the BJP has claims to power in most (but not all) of the country. Any national wave, or even a ripple, could only be in its favour and it stands to gain states if it wins the Lok Sabha. Simultaneous elections would leave the BJP in a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation.
But the idea would entail major legislative headaches for the government before it could ever become a reality. The Representation of People Act (1951) would have to be amended to stipulate simultaneous and fixed terms for the national and state legislatures. Situations of hung houses and loss of confidence would need to be resolved. The remedies could be relatively simple. If no party or coalition is able to cobble together a majority to be proven by a vote of confidence within say, a month of the constitution of the house, the body could be directed to elect a leader who enjoys majority support in another month's time. No absences or abstentions would be allowed in this vote. If no candidate gets a majority, a recourse to either a run-off between the top two candidates, or use of second preferences, as is done in case of legislative council or Rajya Sabha elections would be possible. A vote of no confidence to be effective must be accompanied simultaneously by a constructive vote of confidence for another leader, as is required in Germany. A government, thus, cannot be toppled without installing another one since the legislative body cannot be dissolved before its term.
That would in turn mean rendering nearly toothless that most beloved (of all ruling dispensations) Article 356 of the Constitution, which empowers the President to dismiss state governments, and suspend or dissolve state Assemblies. It might have to be amended, as also possibly Article 327 that governs legislative elections. That could well be too steep a mountain to scale, as the all-too recent parliamentary logjams show.
And what of us common folk? I had written earlier in these pages, "Indians are election junkies, and that includes all of us - political parties, aspirants for seats, pollsters, pundits parsing straws in the wind, polls, results, anything really, and average citizenry who find the ballot dramas played out on their screens and in their papers as endlessly intriguing as family sagas" ("The great Indian addiction," January 18, 2015). Whatever shall we do while we wait for our quinquennial fix?
The writer is an economist who comments on current developments
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
