It's great to have you here for this week's Politics to Policy edition. Today, we're going to talk about the One Nation, One Election (ONOE) reform that is, almost certainly, going to dominate the upcoming parliamentary sessions of India. So let’s get started.

In 2019, Indonesia tried something ambitious: one single day to elect the President, national legislature, regional legislatures, and local councils all at once. The goal was efficiency. The result was 900 dead poll workers and over 5,000 seriously ill. They tried again in 2024. More than 100 deaths, nearly 15,000 illnesses. By June 2025, Indonesia's own Constitutional Court had seen enough and ordered that national and local elections be separated from 2029 onwards.

India is currently moving in the same direction.

The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth Amendment) Bill, 2024, which implements the One Nation, One Election proposal, is working its way through the legislative process. The idea has intuitive appeal: synchronise Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections, reduce costs, limit the disruption caused by the Model Code of Conduct, and stop political parties from living in permanent campaign mode.

The problem is that the proposal, when you actually read what it does, is far more radical than its supporters acknowledge.

The Bill introduces a new Article 82A, which empowers the President to notify an "appointed date" from which all State Assembly tenures would be aligned with the Lok Sabha's electoral cycle. Any Assembly constituted after this date would have its tenure curtailed to fit the national schedule, even if its five-year term had not expired.

It also introduces what the Bill calls "unexpired-term elections." If a legislature is dissolved prematurely, the newly elected legislature would serve only the remainder of the original term rather than receiving a fresh five-year mandate. So if a government falls two years into its term, the next election produces a government that governs for three years and then faces another election.

Additionally, the Bill gives the Election Commission of India the authority to recommend deferring State elections if simultaneous conduct proves impracticable, without specifying clear criteria, time limits, or parliamentary oversight for when that power can be used.

Each of these three elements carries serious consequences that the cost-saving argument completely obscures.

India's parliamentary system is built on a specific principle: governments survive only as long as they retain the confidence of the legislature. This was a deliberate choice made in the Constituent Assembly. Dr B.R. Ambedkar explained it plainly at the time: democracy cannot simultaneously maximise stability and accountability. India chose accountability.

Articles 83 and 172 of the Constitution prescribe only a maximum tenure of five years for the legislature. They do not guarantee a minimum. Some see early dissolution as a flaw in the system. In reality, it is a feature allowing voters to deliver a fresh mandate when a government loses the confidence of the House.

ONOE reverses this logic entirely. It treats dissolution as an administrative inconvenience to be minimised rather than a democratic safeguard to be preserved. A State government that loses its majority would trigger mid-term elections, producing a legislature with only a residual mandate. That government would have little incentive for structural reform and every incentive to focus on short-term populism, knowing it faces another election cycle before it can accomplish much of anything.

The Supreme Court, in S.R. Bommai vs Union of India (1994), affirmed that federalism is part of the Constitution's basic structure. States are constitutionally independent entities with their own democratic rhythms. ONOE allows State mandates to be truncated simply to fit a national calendar. That is a meaningful shift in how Indian federalism actually works.

Supporters of ONOE often point to other democracies as models. The comparisons don't survive scrutiny.

Germany is frequently cited, but Germany's political stability comes from the Constructive Vote of No Confidence, which requires the Bundestag to elect a replacement Chancellor before removing the sitting one. German state elections are deliberately staggered. The stability has nothing to do with electoral timing.

Canada and Australia hold federal and state elections independently, with different tenure lengths that make synchronisation structurally impossible. South Africa and Indonesia use proportional representation systems that diffuse political power and protect minority voices in ways that India's first-past-the-post system does not. The United States runs on fixed electoral cycles because it has a presidential system where the executive's survival is not tied to legislative confidence. India's system works differently by design.

The fiscal case for ONOE is the most commonly cited justification and the least convincing.

Parliamentary Standing Committee estimates put combined Lok Sabha and State Assembly election spending at around Rs. 4,500 crore in 2015-16. That's roughly 0.25% of the Union Budget and about 0.03% of GDP. Lok Sabha election costs have historically ranged between 0.02% and 0.05% of GDP, going back to 1957.

More importantly, the current system of phased elections over multiple weeks allows the Election Commission to rotate EVMs, VVPATs, and security forces across phases. Simultaneous elections would remove that flexibility entirely and require a significant one-time investment in new resources to conduct elections everywhere at once. The claimed administrative savings are, at best, overstated.

Amending the Constitution to restructure India's federal architecture to save fractions of one per cent of GDP is not a trade-off that holds up under scrutiny.

Perhaps the most underappreciated risk in the Bill is the power it gives the Election Commission to defer State elections without adequate checks.

Even Article 356, the provision for President's Rule, contains safeguards: parliamentary approval and strict time limits. Article 82A(5), as proposed, creates a zone of unguided discretion with no equivalent oversight. If a State government falls mid-term, the Union government could theoretically impose President's Rule, defer the State election in the name of synchronisation, and effectively govern the State through the Governor until the next national cycle.

The incoming elected government, when elections finally happen, might inherit only a truncated mandate.

The constitutional question here is that the Amendment makes this abuse constitutionally possible. In the NJAC case (2015), the Supreme Court held that constitutional validity depends on institutional design. An amendment that structurally endangers a basic feature is unconstitutional regardless of how power is actually exercised.

At the national level, a caretaker government awaiting synchronised elections could potentially remain in office beyond the six-month limit between parliamentary sessions under Article 85, and would be limited to a Vote on Account rather than a full Budget, creating real constraints on fiscal governance.

The current system of staggered elections across Parliament, State legislatures, and local bodies is an essential feature of Indian polity.

Continuous elections create a continuous feedback mechanism. Governments at different levels are regularly being evaluated by voters, which keeps them attentive to public sentiment. In a system without any meaningful right of recall, this is the closest available instrument of ongoing accountability. Synchronising elections removes that mechanism and replaces it with a single periodic moment of accountability every five years, with much less leverage for voters in between.

The Justice Kurian Joseph Committee on Union-State Relations, constituted by the Tamil Nadu government, released Part I of its report in February 2026, recommending that the Bill be withdrawn. The Tamil Nadu government has endorsed that position.

The problems ONOE claims to solve: campaign fatigue, MCC disruptions, and administrative costs, are real but manageable within the existing framework. The problems it creates: truncated mandates, weakened federalism, unguided discretion over election timing, and the effective shift toward a quasi-presidential model, are structural and potentially irreversible.

Indonesia spent two election cycles learning that synchronisation comes with costs that efficiency arguments don't capture. Its own courts eventually intervened. India would do well to study that trajectory carefully before amending its Constitution to move in the same direction Indonesia just reversed.

Treating elections as administrative overhead that needs to be optimised is robbing them of their sanctity. They are, in fact, the recurring mechanism through which power is made answerable to the people. The cost of getting that wrong is not measured in rupees.

Thank you for reading through.

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Until next time.

Anas Ahmad Tak