ONOE: The Reset Button That Guts Federalism
Imagine that, one morning in 2029, India’s President issues a routine notification — and in that instant, the clock on every elected state government in India is reset. A state government elected to a full five-year term would see that term cut short the moment the national election clock is reset — no matter how much of its mandate was left. Not because it lost a vote, not because it lost the confidence of its assembly, but because the national calendar demanded it.
That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is, Justice A.P. Shah told a gathering in New Delhi on 4 July, the plain mechanism of the One Nation One Election bill. “If the law is passed,” the former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court said, “the next time India has a national election, the President will press the start button by issuing a notification. That moment becomes the start button for every state assembly as well.” The consequence, he added, is blunt: “the term of every single state assembly will reset to match the term of the Lok Sabha.”
The One Nation One Election project — ONOE, in the shorthand that has attached itself to it — is sold as a tidy reform: synchronise the country’s elections, vote once every five years for both New Delhi and the state capital, and spare the nation its permanent campaign. But across an afternoon of a conclave on federalism, elections and citizenship, a former judge, a former Chief Election Commissioner, a former diplomat and others took the proposal apart. They arrived at a shared conclusion: that ONOE, as written into the 129th Constitutional Amendment Bill now before a Joint Parliamentary Committee, is not a scheduling fix at all. It is a rewiring of the federal compact — and the efficiencies it promises do not survive contact with the fine print.
Also Read: SIR and Citizenship: ‘You Are a Foreigner Until Proven Otherwise’
A model found nowhere in the world
Shah walked the room through the machinery. The bill inserts a new Article 82A to create “simultaneous elections,” and amends Articles 83 and 172 to handle governments that fall early. And it is that second part — what happens when a government collapses mid-cycle — that he called the strangest feature of ONOE.
Under the bill, a government elected to fill a vacancy does not get a fresh five years. It serves only the leftover portion of the original term, so that the national clock stays undisturbed. Take his example: a Maharashtra government elected afresh in 2029 would ordinarily sit until 2034. Should it fall in 2031, the replacement voters choose would not govern until 2036, as now, but only until 2034. “This kind of mid-term election for a then-unexpired term,” Shah said, “is very novel, and does not appear to have any counterpart anywhere in the world.”
That novelty, he argued, quietly corrodes the value of a vote. A citizen voting in a mid-cycle poll elects a legislature “only for the unexpired period,” which means “a mid-term voter’s vote has less value than that of a voter at the start of the full-term cycle.” He put the unfairness as a question: “If the full-term and mid-term governments have the same powers and standing, shouldn’t the votes also have the same strength and weight?” A government that knows its clock is already running down, he added, governs like a caretaker — unable to make hard decisions, its officials and its opponents alike simply waiting it out.
Then there is the one-time cost of getting every assembly onto the same start line. To launch ONOE, every state legislature would have to be dissolved together at the end of a Lok Sabha term, regardless of how much of its own term remained. “This en masse derogation of the legislative assemblies,” Shah said, “even though a one-time affair, is a direct assault on the principle of federalism, and is unworkable for precisely this reason.” His verdict on the design was unsparing: “Even if we assume that simultaneous elections are a good idea, the mechanism proposed in the current bill is deeply problematic.” The One Nation One Election model, he concluded, “is a threat designed to centralise power and silence state voices.”
The Election Commission’s blank cheque
For Shah, the most dangerous clause was the one that hands the Election Commission of India the power to defer a state poll. If the Commission believes an assembly election cannot be held alongside the general election, it can recommend postponing it — and the bill offers no test, no criteria, no limits. The Commission, he said, “essentially has arbitrary and unfettered discretion to do as it pleases.”
That would be worrying under any circumstances; it is more worrying, he argued, given who now controls appointments to the Commission. “We must also bear in mind that in India today, the government has an effective veto in making appointments to the Election Commission.”
An umpire the government effectively appoints, handed the power to delay elections in states the ruling party is unsure of, stops being a referee and becomes a weapon. “You press the trigger,” Shah said, “and the government in power is not sure about certain assemblies. The Election Commission, at their behest, can postpone or defer the elections for these legislative assemblies… So you can really distort the whole scheme of simultaneous elections.” Simultaneity, in that reading, is not the point of ONOE at all — the discretion to set it aside, state by state, is.
Also Read: The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.
The savings that were never there
If Shah dismantled the design, S.Y. Quraishi dismantled the sales pitch. And he did it, at first, with a straight face — pretending to endorse the arguments for ONOE precisely in order to puncture them.
He began by conceding the government’s case fairly. The Prime Minister, he recalled, had long argued that repeated elections are ruinously expensive, that the model code of conduct freezes governance for months at a stretch, and that a country perpetually in campaign mode wastes the time and money of its workers. Those are real concerns, and the Kovind Committee — the high-level panel under former President Ram Nath Kovind that recommended simultaneous polls — reported that some 80 per cent of the public responses it received backed the idea.
Then, one by one, Quraishi took the props away. On the claim that the model code paralyses governance, the former Chief Election Commissioner was categorical. “If you read the model code of conduct,” he said, “you will find that everything under the sun is allowed to happen, except two things” — no new schemes announced to woo voters, and no fresh transfers of officials. Everything else continues. The paralysis, he suggested, is a myth that a former custodian of that very code could puncture from memory.
On cost, he turned the argument inside out. Mid-term elections, he pointed out, still have to be held — for the unexpired term — and cost the same as any other. As Shah had put it, “it is amazing that the bill lists cost-cutting as part of its Statement of Objects and Reasons, but offers a more expensive solution.” And that 80 per cent public support? Quraishi said it collapses the moment you ask how it was gathered. “They issued the proforma only in Hindi and English,” he said. “What about the other languages? Tamil Nadu, Kerala, the South — everywhere the issue of federalism comes in.” The result, he argued, was that “all the responses are from the Hindi heartland, and then they say that 80 per cent of people are in favour. So this is totally misleading.”
The tier that quietly vanished
Quraishi reserved a particular scorn for what ONOE has quietly dropped. The Prime Minister’s original vision, he noted, was for simultaneous elections at all three tiers — Parliament, the states, and the panchayats and municipalities. But the third tier has all but disappeared from the conversation.
“The bottom tier is actually the most important — three million elected people,” he said. “You have left them aside.” What remains, he noted, are “4,120 MLAs and 543 MPs. So much for the determination for simultaneous elections, with this much dilution.”
Where the local tier does appear — in the Kovind Committee’s proposal to hold panchayat polls within a hundred days of the main election — it defeats the whole promise.
Turning to his former colleague Ashok Lavasa, Quraishi noted that conducting elections is “no joke,” carried out not only in Delhi but “in the northeast, in Kashmir, and with what difficulty.” To send exhausted polling staff back out again three months later, he said, is absurd: “Another election held after 100 days — is that a simultaneous election?”
His most damning point was about consent. The Prime Minister, Quraishi recalled, had himself asked for a national debate to build consensus. “The national debate happened, but no consensus was arrived at. So the logical conclusion should have been to drop the idea.” Instead, he said, the response was: “Consensus may go to hell, we cannot achieve it — we are going to do it anyway.”
The double engine
Where the two former election chiefs saw a broken mechanism, Yamini Aiyar saw a deeper design. Federalism, the public-policy scholar argued, is not merely a set of fiscal and administrative arrangements; it is the principle that lets a vast, plural country hold together. “The true challenge of federalism in today’s India,” she said, “is that precisely this idea — that you can be many, and you are still one — is the idea that is being challenged.” ONOE, in her reading, belongs to a broader centralising drift, of which the most telling symptom is a single slogan.
“Yamini referred to the term ‘double engine’ many times,” Quraishi had noted, and Aiyar built her case on it. The pitch that a state prospers only when it elects the same party that rules the centre is not, she argued, a claim about efficiency — it is an argument against the very idea of federal dialogue.
“There is no need for dialogue in a double-engine context,” she said. When a government tells voters to pick the same party at both levels for “efficiency and development,” it is “essentially pitting the federal principle of accommodation, dialogue and deliberation against the possibilities of development, almost arguing that too much democracy is not good for development.”
Quraishi put the same point more bluntly, quoting what he called the most direct attack on federalism he had heard from the top. The double-engine argument, he said, amounts to a threat: “If you do not vote for me, I’ll starve your state of all the funds” — and he added, witheringly, “as if the funds are coming from his ancestral property.” A synchronised national election, both of them suggested, is the natural companion to a politics that wants one engine, one clock, one conversation — and no room for a state to answer back.
Also Read: Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury
One design, many fronts
That the afternoon’s separate anxieties belonged together was the argument Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former diplomat, made in summing up. ONOE, the SIR, the delayed census, the coming delimitation — these, he said, should not be read as unrelated headlines. “These exercises are not isolated, but interlinked. They are part of a grand design.” Among that design’s purposes, he said, was “altering the balance in Parliament between the north and the south.”
That last phrase points to the fear that hangs over the whole debate. A delimitation based on the 2027 census could reward the populous, slower-growing north with more parliamentary seats while the south, which curbed its population growth, loses relative weight — the very anxiety that makes ONOE’s centralising logic so combustible in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Aiyar framed the underlying inequality starkly: “UP’s per capita GDP looks closer to Nepal’s; Tamil Nadu’s per capita GDP looks closer to Indonesia’s.” Redrawing representation across that gulf, she warned, “cannot be resolved by bulldozing legislation through Parliament, and by bulldozing the idea of delimitation without dialogue and debate. It needs a Union that is trustworthy” — and, she added, “all citizens of India should be entitled to minimum public services, regardless of whether they are born in Bihar or born in Kerala.”
It fell to Mano Thangaraj, a DMK legislator from Kanyakumari and the one serving politician to take the floor, to state the constitutional stakes in a sentence. “Our Constitution begins with the words ‘We the people’,” he said, “not ‘We the government’. Governments come and go, but constitutional values must endure.” He offered a data point from his own state as a rejoinder to the sense of inevitability around the ruling party: a civil-society “Zero BJP” campaign, he said, had helped cut the BJP’s Tamil Nadu tally from four seats to one. “We must unite,” he said, “to oppose the common enemy.”
Forever nation, forever election
Against ONOE, the conclave’s chair offered a counter-slogan. Dr G.N. Devy, the linguist and cultural activist, said the phrase itself gets the order of things backwards. “Why talk of One Nation One Election?” he asked. “We should talk of forever nation, forever election.” By “forever nation,” he explained, he meant a simple correction: “the citizen comes before the nation — citizens constitute the nation.” By “forever election,” he meant a democracy in which representatives can be questioned and held to account continuously, “all the way from the panchayat to the presidential election,” rather than one where a single synchronised vote every five years settles everything. He had a sharper line, too, for the state of the country the bill claims to be tidying: “Right now, half a nation has been made, and half an election exists — let that first become one.” Not One Nation One Election, he said, but “a truncated nation and a truncated election.”
There was, from the former Chief Election Commissioner, one note of hope — and it lay in the very slowness the government finds frustrating. The Joint Parliamentary Committee examining the ONOE bill, Quraishi observed, had been at it for the better part of two years without a resolution. “The fact that they have not been able to come to a conclusion means there is internal resistance from the states,” he said. “That is where some hope lies.”
If the bill’s supporters cast ONOE as good housekeeping, the room’s diagnosis was that housekeeping was never the point. The government has made a genuine case — that endless elections are costly, that campaign mode never ends, that a synchronised calendar would let it govern in peace — and the Kovind Committee’s headline number lends it public cover.
What the speakers disputed was whether the cure fits the ailment: whether a reform sold as efficiency is worth a mechanism that shortens some mandates, cheapens some votes, dissolves elected assemblies by operation of law, and hands a government-appointed umpire the discretion to decide which states vote and which wait.
Aditi Mehta, the former civil servant who closed the session, refused to treat the outcome as settled. “Only 37 per cent of our country voted for this government,” she reminded the room, and yet a sense of inevitability had set in. That, she suggested, was the real danger — not the bill, but the resignation around it. The task now, she said, “has to be about how” — how citizens and states answer a proposal that arrives dressed as a clock, and turns out to be a lever. On the evidence of this room, One Nation One Election is not the reform its name promises. It is a question about who, in a federal republic, gets to hold the button.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theprobe.in
