INDIA GREENS PARTY
Issued at iGP NHO at Greendham Anandi-Chait, Unchir-Dunktok, Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand on 5 September 2023.
Press Statement
The India Greens Party (iGP) today said the idea of ‘one nation, one election’ is not good in a diverse country like India.
The party in its statement today said India must move towards a participatory direct democracy, instead of thinking about implementing the ‘one nation, one election’ idea.
The India Greens Party is of the view that the ‘one nation, one election’ idea is just a fancy one in a multicultural, multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multireligious democracy.
“It will kill the idea of diverse India. It will kill the local aspirations and smaller parties. It will first establish a two-party system, and then progress towards a one-party-led authoritarianism. And, it will be a vulgar expression of a religion-infused nationalism autocracy,” the party pointed out.
The party is of the view that the idea of ‘one nation, one election’ is going to be the first step towards introducing an Executive Presidency. If there is only one simultaneous election for states and the Centre, it will also cause some troublesome issues even in the current parliamentary system.
What if a state government loses majority and falls after say, two years of a five-year term? Will there be proxy rule of the Centre through Presidential rule in the remaining years of the term?
Or, will the central government engineer defections to install an alternative government like in Maharashtra for the rest of the term, feeding on the insecurity of MLAs about Presidential rule?
If this one election principle is applicable to local bodies like corporations, municipalities and panchayats, it will make the system more monolithic, dictatorial and rigid.
Also, what if a central coalition government loses majority before the full-term? There can’t be an interim election as per the ‘one nation, one election’ idea. That’s why, the party thinks they’ll propose an Executive Presidency as the next step to make parliamentary majority irrelevant under this clever scheme.
All this will eventually move us further away from democracy, not to talk of participatory democracy and proportional representation.
Also, it will be a massive advantage for the so-called mainstream parties to have elections simultaneously. A party like the BJP with its humongous budget will be able to do massive campaigning on both the national and state level.
And, if the elections are done simultaneously, the regional parties with small budgets will be absolutely helpless.
Besides, the regional issues that local people often present in their local language and cultures will be overshadowed by the national narratives, especially when national parties have the money to spend on it.
This will only favour the big parties in the spotlight and will eliminate the smaller regional parties.
It is sad that the ruling parties have a classic pattern of making a big noise about some new proposal without giving any relevant details on it like they did for the UCC.
It seems they have a schedule of tasks but they have fallen behind because they probably didn’t expect the kind of protests they got against the CAA, the NRC, the Farm laws, etc.
Now, it feels like they are acting out of desperation with the INDIA alliance, and other factors are bound to take a series of extreme steps that will probably shock all of us.
–Issued by the iGP Chief Spokesperson Suresh Nautiyal.
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(India Greens Party is registered with the Election Commission of India under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Registration Number: 56/476/2018-19/PPS-I, effective from 18/07/2019.)
National Head Office: GreenDham AnandiChait, IndraBalbhadra Parisar, Unchir-Dunktok, SH-31, PO-Ghurdauri, Distt-Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand, INDIA. PIN-246194.
Email: contact@indiagreensparty.org Website: https://indiagreensparty.org
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