The Lok Sabha on Tuesday gave an extension to the 39-member joint parliamentary committee (JPC), which is examining two bills aimed to usher in simultaneous state and national polls, till the first day of the last week of the monsoon session to submit its report.
The development came on a day attorney general R Venkatramani backed the simultaneous elections plan and told JPC that the legislation did not trample on any feature of the Constitution and were good in law, said people aware of developments.
Venkatramani argued that the two bills — the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth Amendment) Bill, 2024, which aims to conduct simultaneous elections for Lok Sabha and state assemblies, and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024, which seeks to align the assembly elections of Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry for simultaneous elections — did not require any further changes.
But former Delhi high court chief justice DN Patel suggested to JPC that the bills might require additional amendments in the Constitution, said the people cited above.
Both bills are being reviewed by the panel led by senior BJP lawmaker PP Chaudhary. ”We received very good inputs and information…One Nation One Election is in the best interests of the nation…The next meeting will be held on 2nd April,” he told news agency ANI.
Justice Patel, who is currently the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal chairman, spoke before Venkatramani and supported the bill. Patel, according to some functionaries, suggested that eight additional amendments to the Constitution are required to make the bill more effective.
Trinamool Congress’s Kalyan Banerjee, one of the most vocal opponents of the bill, questioned justice Patel and said as the government did not propose any further amendments, the bill is not desirable. Justice Patel retorted that he was talking about “practical points”. To this, Banerjee asked him to also talk about Article 368, which deals with the process of Constitutional amendments.
Banerjee also said that since the National Democratic Alliance did not have the numbers to pass the Constitution amendment, it also practically meant that there was no use to discuss this bill, said the people cited above.
Article 368 stipulates that “an amendment of this Constitution may be initiated only by the introduction of a bill for the purpose in either House of Parliament, and when the bill is passed in each House by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting, it shall be presented to the President who shall give his assent to the bill and thereupon the Constitution shall stand amended in accordance with the terms of the bill” in most cases.
Justice Patel noted that the challenges in front of the simultaneous elections proposal included “federalism concerns with potential impact on state autonomy”, a risk of national issues overshadowing regional ones, as well as constitutional hurdles of the need to amend some of the articles.
He said the tenures of some assemblies could be extended in a step towards synchronisation of state polls with the Lok Sabha elections, an idea not part of the current bills.
The people cited above said Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra questioned if countries such as Sweden and Belgium could be compared to India, when Patel cited them as examples of the global practice of simultaneous polls.
She also said all the claims about the benefits of simultaneous elections were mostly conjectures, as no study was done.
Venkatramani, according to the functionaries cited above, told the members that he was the attorney general of India and not the government, in an apparent attempt to dispel any impression that he will side with the government’s opinion on the matter.
He told the members that he will submit replies to their additional questions sent to him.
Chaudhary later told reporters that simultaneous elections were in the interest of the country, and the committee was deliberating on the best ways to carry it out. The views received by legal luminaries will help the panel form its recommendations, he said.
The Union Cabinet, on September 18, approved the recommendations of the Ramnath Kovind-led committee set up in September 2023 to study the idea, popularly known as One Nation One Election (ONOE). The Cabinet’s approval is merely a start; several laws need to be amended before ONOE becomes a reality, and with parties ruling several state governments opposed to the idea, and the NDA itself not having the kind of overwhelming numerical superiority it once did in Parliament, it will take some doing.
While 32 political parties including the Shiv Sena, Biju Janata Dal and YSRCP have supported the idea, another 14 including the Congress, TMC and DMK have opposed it. The main reason for Opposition appears to be the fear that simultaneous elections could favour the national political hegemon, in this case the BJP. Indeed, in his letter to the Kovind panel, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge claimed simultaneous elections go against guarantees of federalism and the composition of Kovind panel was highly biased.
Top jurists such as former CJIs UU Lalit, Ranjan Gogoi and senior advocate Harish Salve have so far briefed the panel on the proposed legislation. The JPC has so far held five meetings.