4 minutes reading time
There is a new song being hummed in the corridors of power, and it has a very catchy title: “One Nation, One Election.”
It sounds so efficient, doesn’t it? So tidy. Like a man who decides to save time by eating his breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a single sitting at six in the morning. It saves on the washing up, certainly, but it leaves him rather bloated and prone to making very poor decisions for the rest of the day.
The argument for simultaneous elections is always built on the twin pillars of “cost” and “governance.” They tell us we spend too much money on elections. They tell us the “Model Code of Conduct” stops the government from doing its work every time a tiny state goes to the polls.
They are effectively saying that democracy is too expensive and too inconvenient for the people running it.
What happens when you merge a state election with a national election?
You aren't just saving on paper and security guards. You are mechanically guaranteeing that local issues—the price of water in a village, the quality of a school in a district, the specific local failures of a state government—are completely flattened by the steamroller of national hype.
In a simultaneous election, the voter isn't choosing a Chief Minister and a Prime Minister. They are choosing a vibe. They are caught in a single, massive media wave manufactured in Delhi, fueled by thousands of crores in corporate advertising, and centered on a single face.
If you have a problem with your local drain, and the man who is supposed to fix it is from the same party as the man on the national poster, you will vote for the drain-breaker anyway. Because the national wave makes you feel like you are participating in a "Great Civilizational Choice," rather than deciding who handles your sewage.
It is a mechanical trick to nationalize local politics. It is a way to ensure that the "High Command" doesn't have to deal with 29 different messy, local arguments. They can just win once, in one big sweep, and be done with it.
The people pushing for this tell us it will bring "stability."
Stability is a word that politicians use when they mean "lack of opposition." When you have elections every year in different states, the ruling party is kept on its toes. They have to keep proving themselves. They have to keep listening to the ground. They are in a state of constant, healthy accountability.
"One Nation, One Election" turns that accountability into a five-year vacation. Once you win the Big Day, you are safe for half a decade. No state election can humiliate you. No local grievance can threaten your majority. You can pass whatever you want, ignore whoever you want, and just wait for the next Big Day to fire up the media machine again.
It is the dream of every monopolist. Why compete every day when you can just rig the market once every five years?
India is not a "One Nation" in the way they want it to be. It is a Union of States. It is a collection of languages, cultures, and histories that have very little in common except a shared border and a shared set of problems.
By forcing a single election day, you are telling the people of Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Kerala that their local issues don't matter enough to have their own day in the sun. You are telling them they must synchronize their heartbeat with the heartbeat of Delhi.
It is the final step in the centralization of the Indian soul.
They want us to be a single, uniform mass of consumers who can be swayed by a single slogan on a single day. They want to turn our democracy into a fast-food franchise—efficient, standardized, and utterly devoid of local flavor.
I’ll stick to my local messes, thank you. At least the smell is honest.