Author: Shashvat, B.A. LL.B. Third Year, ILS Law College, Pune
The proposal to synchronise India’s electoral calendar undera single simultaneous cycle — popularly styled as One Nation, One Election (ONOE) — has attracted both institutional momentum and constitutional controversy in near-equal measure. The Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, 2024, introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 17, 2024, represents the most legislatively concrete expression of this idea since India abandoned concurrent elections following the wave of premature legislative dissolutions in 1968 and 1969. Proponents frame ONOE as a governance imperative: an antidote to policyparalysis, electoral expenditure inflation, and the administrativeattrition caused by a near-permanent election calendar. Critics, anchored in the basic structure doctrine established in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973), characterise the proposal as a structural assault on federalism, executive accountability, and the democratic autonomy of statelegislatures. This article navigates both positions with analyticaleven-handedness. Drawing on election law, political science, andconstitutional jurisprudence, it argues that ONOE’s core efficiency logic is defensible, but its implementation architecture — particularly the forced truncation of state assembly terms — requires significant constitutional recalibration before the reform can be regarded as democratically legitimate and federally sound.
India currently operates what may be described, without exaggeration, as a perpetual election economy. Between 2014 and 2024, the country conducted over thirty state assemblyelections, interspersed with two general elections and numerousby-polls, producing a governing environment where no centraladministration completes a calendar year entirely free of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The MCC, while essential to electoral integrity, operates as a de facto moratorium on new policy announcements, infrastructure launches, and welfarescheme extensions — effectively suspending
executive action for months at a time, repeatedly, across a five-year parliamentary term. The ECI’s own figures indicate that the 2019 Lok Sabha elections cost the government exchequer alone over rupees 15,000 crore; when campaign expenditure by political parties and candidates is aggregated, the Centre for Media Studies estimated total spending approaching rupees 60,000 crore in that single election cycle. The cumulative fiscal, administrative, and governance cost of staggered elections is not a minor operational inconvenience, but a structural drag on thequality of democratic governance. ONOE, at its core, proposesto dissolve this drag and restore the governing tempo that a democracy of India’s complexity and ambition requires. The legal and political questions raised by opponents — anchored inconstitutional doctrine rather than partisan sentiment
— deserve rigorous engagement. Rigorous engagement, however, is not the same as rejection. The objections to the 129th Amendment Bill, properly understood, are objections to its specific implementation architecture, not to the underlying democratic logic of electoral synchronisation. A reform that canbe refined is not a reform that should be abandoned.
Historical Context: Simultaneity Lost and thePath to Restoration
Simultaneous elections are not a novel constitutional invention — they are a constitutional inheritance. The first four general elections of independent India, held between 1951 and 1967, were conducted concurrently with state assembly elections, reflecting not only logistical convenience but aconstitutional design premised on aligned democratic mandates.This synchrony was fractured not by constitutional amendmentbut by political contingency: the premature dissolution of several state assemblies following the political fragmentation of the late 1960s created an irreversible desynchronisation of electoral cycles that has persisted for over five decades, progressively worsening as coalition instability at the state level multiplied the frequency of mid-term polls.
Institutional recognition of the problem is long-standing. The Law Commission’s 170th Report (1999) recommended phased restoration of concurrent elections; NITI Aayogpublished a working paper in 2017 endorsing similarconclusions. The High-Level Committee chaired by former President Ram Nath Kovind submitted its report in March 2024, recommending a two-phase approach: first synchronising Lok Sabha and state assembly elections, then aligning local body polls. The Cabinet accepted these recommendations inSeptember 2024, leading to the introduction of the Constitution
(129th Amendment) Bill, 2024, in the Lok Sabha on December17, 2024. Both bills were referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee on December 19, 2024, with full implementation projected no earlier than 2034.
The Case For: Efficiency, Continuity, andDemocratic Quality
The strongest argument for ONOE is fiscal and administrative. Analyses by the Centre for Media Studies estimate that simultaneous elections could reduce election-related expenditure by 25 to 40 percent per cycle, yieldinggovernment savings of rupees 7,500 to 12,000 crore. Beyond direct expenditure, indirect costs are equally compelling: the repeated deployment of security personnel, civil servants, and school infrastructure as polling stations disrupts public services cyclically. Teachers are routinely diverted to election duty, with measurable consequences for educational continuity. The Kovind Committee noted that implementing simultaneous elections would require a one-time outlay of approximately rupees 9,284 crore for Electronic Voting Machines and VVPAT systems — a cost that, amortised across long-term synchronisation savings, yields a strongly positive fiscal outcome.
The governance continuity argument deserves a particular analytical weight. The MCC prohibits the ruling government from announcing new schemes, transfers, or appointments once an election is notified, creating recurring policy freezes. In a country where major states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,Maharashtra, and West Bengal — collectively represent hundreds of millions of citizens and enormous budgetary allocations, a freeze on infrastructure and welfare decision-making during their election periods carries national fiscal consequences. ONOE would, by design, concentrate the MCC’s operational impact into a single defined period — typically twoto three months every five years — restoring meaningfulgovernance continuity for the remaining four to four-and-a-half years of each electoral cycle. Long-horizon investments in education, healthcare infrastructure, and urban development are structurally disadvantaged in a governance environment where the MCC recurrently halts public spending and administrative transfers.
From a political science perspective, simultaneous elections may also enhance voter participation and democratic engagement. Research on off-cycle elections consistently demonstrates lower turnout and reduced mass-elite congruence. A unified national electoral event, by contrast, generates greatersalience, media coverage, and
civic mobilisation. There is also a potential benefit to campaignfinance regulation: a single concentrated campaign period islogistically easier to monitor for expenditure compliance than a rolling succession of state campaigns conducted under varying enforcement environments across different ECI and SEC jurisdictions.
The Case Against: Federalism, Accountability,and the Basic Structure
The constitutional objections to ONOE are not merely political rhetoric; they engage in foundational doctrine. Thebasic structure doctrine, authoritatively established in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) and reaffirmed in Indira Nehru Gandhi
v. Raj Narain (1975) and S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994), holds that Parliament’s constituent power under Article 368 cannot destroy or abrogate the essential features of the Constitution. Federalism — understood as the structural autonomy of states as co-equal constitutional units — has been explicitly identified as a component of the basic structure. The proposed insertion of Article 82A, which would truncate the terms of state legislative assemblies to align with the Lok Sabha’s cycle, raises a credible doctrinal question: does compulsorily shortening a state assemblies constitutionally guaranteed five-year term under Article 172 — without the assembly’s consent, and without state ratification under Article 368(2) — constitute an amendment that damages the federal character of the Constitution? The 129th Amendment Bill’sdeliberate choice not to require state ratification is itself a centralising signal that critics find difficult to reconcile with the federal principle.
The accountability concern is structurally independent of the federalism of objection and equally significant. In a parliamentary democracy, the legitimacy of government derives from its continued ability to command a legislative majority. Articles 75 and 164 of the Constitution make ministerscollectively responsible to their respective legislatures; the mechanism through which that accountability operates is precisely the possibility that a government may lose its majority and must seek a fresh mandate. The 129th Amendment Bill’sresidual-term provision — requiring mid-term elections to beheld only for the balance of a term rather than a fresh five-yearperiod — structurally weakens this accountability mechanism, producing replacement governments with diminished mandates.
The coattail effect is a third and empirically grounded concern. Political science literature consistently demonstrates that when national and state elections are held concurrently,voters tend to support the same party at both levels, producing ahalo effect that advantages the dominant national party andmarginalises regional formations. India’s party system is structurally pluralist: the DMK in Tamil Nadu, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, and the YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh derive legitimacy from state-level mandates anchored in local concerns. Merging those mandates with a national electoral event risks displacing concerns about water allocation, land revenue, and linguistic minority rights with the vocabulary of national security and central government performance — homogenising political outcomes and diminishing the representational granularity India’s federal democracy was designed to sustain.
Case Laws: The Jurisprudential Framework
Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (AIR 1973 SC1461)
This thirteen-judge constitutional bench judgment is the inescapable jurisprudential reference point for any evaluation of ONOE’s constitutionality. The Court held, by a narrow majority, that while Parliament possesses broad constituent power under Article 368, it cannot use that power to abrogate or destroy the basic structure or essential features of the Constitution. Chief Justice Sikri’s formulation identified these features as including the supremacy of the Constitution, the republican and democratic form of government, the secular character of the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the federal character of the Constitution. The direct relevance to ONOE lies in the last two: a proposal that subordinates state legislative terms to a centrally determined election calendar, without meaningful state consent, must satisfy the Court that it does not damage the federal character identified in Kesavananda as beyond Parliament’s amending competence. This remains the mostsignificant constitutional barrier the 129th Amendment Bill will face if challenged before the Supreme Court.
S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (AIR 1994 SC 1918)
The Bommai judgment, a nine-judge bench decision, significantly entrenched the federal principle by placing judicial constraints on the misuse of Article 356 (President’s Rule). The Court held that the floor of the legislative assembly is the appropriate forum for testing a government’s majority, not the subjective satisfaction of the Governor. The ONOE critics’concern about extended President’s Rule in the event of mid-term
government collapse is directly refracted through this judgment:if ONOE’s residual-term mechanism replaces fresh elections with presidentially administered governance for prolonged periods, it risks recreating the centralising pathology that Bommai sought to arrest. The judgment’s broader message — that states are not administrative sub-units of the Union but constitutionally co-equal partners — resonates directly with the federalism critique of the 129th Amendment Bill.
Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain (AIR 1975 SC 2299)
This judgment, delivered in the charged political context of the Emergency, reaffirmed democracy and free and fair electionsas elements of the basic structure itself. Justice Mathew’sconcurring opinion located electoral legitimacy at thefoundational level of constitutional identity, making clear that even structural reforms to the electoral architecture must be internally consistent with democratic values. The lesson for ONOE is that constitutional reforms to the electoral calendarmust themselves carry democratic legitimacy — enacted with genuine political consensus and not through bare legislative arithmetic. The 129th Amendment Bill’s introduction by a vote of 269 in favour against 198 opposed, well below the two-thirds supermajority required for passage, signals that the political consensus ONOE’s constitutional legitimacy demands do not yet exist and must be actively built.
Conclusion: The Reform India Needs — But Not Yet as Written
ONOE’s core premise is analytically sound. A democracy that spends a disproportionate fraction of its governance capacity, treasury, and administrative bandwidth on an unbrokensuccession of elections — and where the MCC operates as a rolling restraint on executive action — is not functioning at itsconstitutional potential. The fiscal and governance efficiency arguments for electoral synchronisation are not ideologicallypartisan; they were advanced by the Law Commission in 1999,endorsed by NITI Aayog, and adopted by a cross-party High-Level Committee. The question, therefore, is not whether India needs electoral reform — it plainly does, and the institutional consensus provides adequate justification for action — but whether the specific constitutional architecture of the 129th Amendment Bill, in its current form, is equal to the democraticand federal standards the reform demands withoutcompromising the pluralist foundations of Indian constitutionalism.
Two structural modifications could substantially improve Bill’s constitutional defensibility. First, the truncation of state assembly terms should be replaced by a voluntary convergence mechanism: states should be incentivised — through fiscal transfers or enhanced central assistance — to align theirelectoral cycles with the national calendar through their own legislative action, rather than having alignment imposed by central amendment. This approach would preserve the federalprinciple while advancing the synchronisation objective and would likely insulate the reform from a basic structure challenge. Second, the residual-term mechanism must be reconsidered: requiring a replacement government to faceelections only for the balance of a term dilutes executive accountability and produces institutionally weakened governments at precisely the moment when democratic legitimacy matters most.
India’s democratic maturity is measured not only by the scale of its elections but by the quality of the governance theyproduce. A perpetual electoral calendar that forces governments into a permanent campaign of posture, suppresses long-horizon policy thinking, and drains public resources is a structural impediment to that maturity. ONOE, reformed and consensually enacted, can address that impediment. But a constitutional democracy cannot end one kind of cycle — the cycle ofperpetual elections — by creating another: a cycle of centralisedelectoral uniformity imposed over a diverse and genuinely federal polity. The reform must carry the Constitution with it, not against it, and must secure the genuine consent of the statesit binds — not merely the arithmetic of a central legislature.
