Sri Vijaya Puram, Sept. 19:
The Union Cabinet has accepted the recommendations of the Kovind Committee for simultaneous elections to Parliament, state legislative assemblies and local bodies.
The `One Nation, One Election’ model, if implemented, will undermine the parliamentary democratic system itself and the federal structure.
The proposals amount to truncating the life of some legislative assemblies to align them with the Lok Sabha election. Further, if a state government falls and the assembly is to be dissolved, then the mid-term election held will be only for the remaining term of the assembly. All these violate the rights of the people to elect their representatives for a term of five years as envisaged in the Constitution. Moreover, the recommendation of only holding mid-term election for the remaining term of the assembly defeats the very purpose of the new scheme, which is supposed to avoid multiplicity of election. After a mid-term election, there will have to be another election at the end of the five-year term.
The attack on federalism is all the more insidious with the move to hold simultaneous election to all panchayats and municipal bodies. This is centralization to the extreme and goes against the very purpose of decentralized decision-making local bodies. Holding of panchayat and local body elections is under the purview of the state governments and this is sought to be denied. It is also an absurd proposition given the huge diversity of India and differing conditions in various states.
The `One Nation, One Election’ concept is the brainchild of the RSS-BJP, which wants to create a centralized unitarian State with one leader at the helm.
The CPI(M) will strongly oppose any move to amend the Constitution for this purpose. Every party, which values democracy, pluralism and federalism, should come out firmly in opposition and unitedly thwart this pernicious move.
