Former CJI Justice MN Venkatachallaiah said, “Local issues are likely to take a backseat if state Assembly elections are clubbed together with Parliamentary polls.” (File photo) Former CJI Justice MN Venkatachallaiah said, “Local issues are likely to take a backseat if state Assembly elections are clubbed together with Parliamentary polls.” (File photo)

Former Chief Justice of India, and the head of the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution, Justice M N Venkatachallaiah, has raised several red flags on the Law Commission’s draft proposal for ‘simultaneous elections’, made public on Tuesday.

Justice Venkatachallaiah, appointed to head the Constitution review panel by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government in February 2000, said that a decision to hold Lok Sabha and state Assembly elections at one go should be taken only after comprehensively consulting all elected representatives, and must ensure that the federal principle is not violated in the process.

Moreover, local issues are likely to take a backseat if state Assembly elections are clubbed together with Parliamentary polls, he maintained.

“I have said so before, and I will repeat: in a Parliamentary democracy like ours, things like a referendum or a snap poll do not work,” Justice Venkatachallaiah told The Indian Express from Bengaluru. “They could (work) in some countries, but are unsuitable for our democratic culture.”

He said that if there is only one election, vital local issues would “always get submerged”, and will not be addressed. “If state and Central elections are held separately, then all issues find democratic and appropriate expression,” he added.

The idea of “simultaneous elections”, Justice Venkatachallaiah maintained, can be pithily met with the exhortation, “Oh Lord, make me holy, but not today.”

“This proposal,” he said, “needs opinions of all elected representatives in India, and in a vibrant democracy, this means all the way down to the village panchayat heads, and equal weightage (has) to be given to all their opinions — it needs their opinion poll.”

In the draft proposal of the Law Commission, made public on Tuesday, panchayat elections have been kept outside the purview of the idea of the proposed “one election”, as it is seen as a “state subject” and the “number of local bodies being too big”.

Justice Venkatachallaiah said that the Supreme Court and traditional wisdom so far had held federalism to be “just quasi-federalism. I disagreed with it in the report I wrote for the Constitution Review Commission and I made it clear that while at times of great national danger, a unitary way of looking at things is important, at times of peace, federalism must prevail.

“But the balance must always tilt on the side of federalism.”

He said, “It may be said that local polls have higher (voter) numbers…than the national poll, and clubbing them together would raise percentages of people who participate in the political process. But that is just one of the arguments.”

Justice Venkatachallaiah also dwelt on the operational difficulties of getting such an idea off the ground even if seen as a “game-changer” and if politically agreed upon, it would need at least “five Constitutional amendments” to come into effect.

Simultaneous elections were the norm till 1967, but following dissolution of some state Assemblies in 1968 and 1969 and the dissolution of Parliament in 1970, elections to Assemblies and Parliament are held separately. The idea of simultaneous elections first was brought up after that in the annual report of the Election Commission in 1983.

Most recently, Niti Aayog prepared a working paper on this in January 2017.

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