One nation, many elections

India needs more elections, not fewer of them

India’s longest ever general election campaign has ended. It has been both tedious and exhausting. Few new issues or standout candidates have emerged. We have been starved of opinion polls for weeks and that has led to speculative excesses, both in conversation and in the stock markets — excesses that will no doubt survive the glut of unreliable exit polls with which we will be regaled tonight. Meanwhile, the model code of conduct severely restricts the process of policy making and legislation — while also failing to restrain powerful campaigners from rhetoric that should be far more circumscribed.

Indian elections are complicated, yes. Our electorate is of unimaginable size, yes. But that does not necessarily mean they should be so long.

The Prime Minister is aware of this concern, and has often spoken about “one nation, one election” as an antidote. The home minister has so much as assured the public that this system will be brought in by the new Parliament.

Yet such a cure will be worse than the disease. India has multiple levels of government, and multiple issues with governance. We need shorter elections, not longer ones — but we also need more meaningful ones, not fewer.

One thing that has become absolutely clear during the campaign is that voters are happy with the possibility of voting one way during an Assembly election and another way for Parliament. They recognise that there are two very different sets of skills and policy platforms being presented at these two different levels. This allows them to send important disaggregated messages about policy preferences to the political class.

Replacing this system with a single election, even if for both levels of election, will take away this useful property. State governments should be judged on their own performance, not as an extension of how well or poorly the party in power in New Delhi has performed.

Indeed, we need more elections. Local elections in India need to be amplified to the level they are elsewhere. This would require local bodies to have greater powers to tax and to set policy.

The 73rd amendment to the Constitution, which introduced panchayati raj, was typically hasty and incomplete. It was, in fact, a half-measure, and half-measures fail completely. It listed out the policy areas that could be devolved by states to the third level of governance — but it did not mandate any devolution. As a result, while all states created local bodies, they were provided with few functions. Those functions instead became the province of unaccountable agencies in the state capital.

Voters need to be given issues to vote on, and elections for representatives that can act on those issues. Voting for a member of Parliament does very little, institutionally, to change the level of accountability for public services within your community. This inherent flaw in India’s current democratic setup would be enhanced by one nation, one election.

A more perfect democracy requires an active third layer with regular meaningful elections. If our roads and drainage don’t work, we should be able to vote out the person in charge. Currently we merely take out our anger at failing institutions on whoever we can. This is temporarily satisfying, but functionally pointless.

But it is not only accountability for the quality of public services and governance that the democratic process provides. It also provides voice, and a location in which people choose to express their identity. But Indians have multiple identities: Locality, caste, religion, language, nationhood. When you have multiple elections at multiple times to multiple different levels of government, you can more freely and fully express those identities. That keeps the peace. It keeps us united.

Replacing these frequent opportunities with a single one would make our current clashes of identity worse, not better. It is possible that one or another political party might be temporarily advantaged. But it is not in anyone’s interest for politics to become an all-or-nothing contest.

Calls for a single election are understandable, especially at the end of a campaign as gruelling as this one has been. But there is enough on the next Parliament’s plate. It should not be distracted by unnecessary and counter-productive changes to the electoral system. If it really wants to improve the voting process, let it create a consensus for more effective panchayati raj — and limit the number of weeks that a general election takes.