The proposal for “One Nation, One Election” (ONOE) has now moved to the forefront of India’s constitutional discourse following the One-hundred and Twenty-ninth Constitutional Amendment Bill, 2024. It is projected as a functional reform intended to reduce electoral expenditure, minimise the prolonged deployment of security personnel, limit interruptions caused by the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), and prevent political parties from remaining in perpetual campaign mode. Its attraction is evident: uniformity seems efficient, synchronisation seems orderly, and repetition appears unnecessary.
The central issue, however, is not whether simultaneous elections can be designed with sufficient institutional creativity, but whether such a framework is compatible with the deeper principles of the Indian constitution. Viewed from this perspective, ONOE is not merely an administrative adjustment. It is a structural alteration – one that changes the meaning of legislative tenure, weakens the freshness of electoral mandates, and raises serious concerns for parliamentary democracy and federalism.
The illusion of a forgotten constitutional ideal
The defence of ONOE often begins with a reference to history.
India, it is argued, once held simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies between 1952 and 1967. The current arrangement of staggered elections is therefore depicted as a later departure from an original and more efficient model. This account is misleading. The early synchronisation was the political outcome of Congress dominance.
That arrangement collapsed after 1967.
Opposition parties established governments in several states, coalition politics emerged, and governments began collapsing before completing their terms because of fractured verdicts, shifting alliances, defections, and the repeated use – and misuse – of Article 356. Insurgency and prolonged President’s Rule in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir further widened the divergence.
The fourth Lok Sabha was dissolved early in 1970. Union governments formed in 1977, 1989, 1996, and 1998 also failed to complete full five-year terms. Consequently, Lok Sabha and assembly elections became progressively asynchronous.
This divergence reflects India’s reality as a complex and diverse polity. Different states follow different political trajectories because their electorates express their will under distinct social, regional, and political conditions.
Staggered elections are therefore not an anomaly. They are the natural outcome of parliamentary democracy functioning within a federal framework. Current proposals for ONOE seek to artificially reverse this organic development of India’s federal polity.
The constitutional amendment proposal
The most detailed blueprint for simultaneous elections in India emerged from the high-level committee chaired by former President Ram Nath Kovind (2023–24). The proposal has now assumed legislative form in the One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Constitution Amendment Bill, 2024.
At the core of the Bill is the proposed insertion of Article 82A, which authorises the president to notify the date of the first sitting of the Lok Sabha after a general election as the “appointed date.”
From that point onward, the tenure of all state legislative assemblies would be aligned with the Lok Sabha’s electoral cycle. The Bill also introduces the mechanism of unexpired-term elections: if an assembly is dissolved prematurely, the new assembly would serve only the remainder of the original term rather than receiving a fresh mandate.
Thus, any assembly constituted after the “appointed date” would have its tenure shortened to expire with the Lok Sabha, even if its ordinary five-year term has not fully run its course. For example, if ONOE is introduced from the 2029 Lok Sabha elections and Tamil Nadu goes to the polls in 2031, that assembly would serve only three years, ending with the Lok Sabha in 2034.
Similarly, assemblies elected in 2027, such as Uttar Pradesh, and in 2028, such as Karnataka, whose normal terms would expire in 2032 and 2033, would, after fresh elections, serve reduced terms of only two years and one year respectively, solely to align with the 2034 Lok Sabha cycle.
In addition, the Bill empowers the Election Commission of India (ECI) to recommend postponing state assembly elections if simultaneous conduct is considered impracticable, without prescribing any clear outer limit.
This could theoretically enable the ECI to recommend delaying the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections by two years and the Karnataka assembly elections by one year, leaving those states under President’s Rule merely to preserve synchronisation with the 2034 Lok Sabha cycle.
To operationalise these changes, amendments are proposed to Articles 83, 172, and 327 of the constitution.
Lessons from other democracies
Comparative constitutional experience offers little support for enforced electoral synchronisation by compelling sub-national units to shorten their mandates merely to fit a national timetable.
Canada preserves independent federal and provincial electoral cycles. The House of Commons has a maximum tenure of five years, subject to earlier dissolution, while provincial legislatures function under their own constitutional and statutory frameworks. The federal government cannot recalibrate provincial tenures for administrative convenience.
Australia is structurally different. The federal House of Representatives has a maximum tenure of three years, while state legislatures are governed by separate state constitutional arrangements, many providing four-year terms. Permanent national-state synchronisation is therefore not embedded into the constitutional design.
Germany is often incorrectly invoked. Its stability does not rest upon synchronised elections. The Bundestag has a four-year term, while elections to the Länder legislatures follow independent cycles. Stability is instead secured through the constructive vote of no confidence: the Bundestag may remove a chancellor only by simultaneously electing a successor.
The United States is an even weaker comparison. It is a presidential system in which the president has a fixed four-year term and does not depend upon legislative confidence. India is parliamentary; governments may fall whenever confidence is lost. Importing fixed electoral cycles without the separation of powers that makes such rigidity workable would create constitutional incoherence.
Indonesia and South Africa are frequently cited, but both comparisons are misplaced.
Indonesia is a presidential republic. Its president is directly elected for a fixed term and does not depend upon legislative confidence. Its legislature is elected through open-list proportional representation, not first-past-the-post.
In 2019, Indonesia held presidential, national legislative, regional representative, and local legislative elections on a single day. The human cost was severe: more than 550 poll workers died and over 1,800 fell seriously ill, largely from exhaustion. Even after safeguards such as health screenings and age limits in 2024, more than 100 workers died and nearly 15,000 fell ill.
In June 2025, Indonesia’s constitutional court directed that national and local elections be separated from 2029 onward, holding that complete simultaneity overburdened voters and administrators and impaired democratic participation. Accordingly, national elections will now be held at least two to two-and-a-half years apart from regional and local elections, thereby restoring a staggered electoral cycle.
South Africa conducts national and provincial elections together, but under party-list proportional representation. It is parliamentary in operation: the president is elected by the National Assembly from among its members and remains accountable to parliament.
Unlike India, however, South Africa does not use first-past-the-post for national and provincial elections. Proportional representation moderates electoral waves and protects representational balance. India’s first-past-the-post system magnifies swings; synchronised elections could therefore nationalise state contests and weaken state-level accountability.
What is absent everywhere is the defining feature of ONOE: truncation of mandates for synchronisation. That absence reflects a fundamental principle – federalism requires autonomous electoral cycles, and democracy requires fresh mandates.
Parliamentary democracy: Responsibility before stability
The constitution of India establishes a parliamentary form of government. This choice was neither accidental nor unreflective. In the constituent assembly, B. R. Ambedkar emphasised that no democratic system can maximise both stability and responsibility.
A choice must therefore be made. India chose responsibility – the continuous accountability of the executive to the legislature.
This choice is embedded within the constitution. Articles 75(3) and 164(2) establish the collective responsibility of Union and state executives to their legislatures. Articles 83(2) and 172(1) prescribe only a maximum five-year tenure for the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies, not an assured term. The implication is clear: governments have no constitutional right to complete five years; if legislative confidence is lost, the system must respond either by forming an alternative government or by returning to the electorate.
Early dissolution is therefore not a constitutional failure; it is a democratic safeguard, ensuring that executive authority remains tied to legislative confidence and, ultimately, to the people’s will.
ONOE disrupts this design. By tying elections to a rigid national calendar, it imports fixed-term logic into a parliamentary system. Elections cease to respond to political reality and become subordinate to administrative synchronisation.
The fall of a government is no longer treated as an occasion for democratic renewal, but as a disruption to be managed. This shift from responsibility to stability alters the character of parliamentary democracy itself.
Federalism: Subordination through synchronisation
In S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994), the Supreme Court affirmed that states are not administrative appendages of the Centre but constitutionally autonomous entities, and that federalism forms part of the basic structure. This autonomy necessarily includes the freedom of states to follow their own democratic rhythms.
ONOE unsettles this principle. The “appointed date” converts the Lok Sabha cycle into the master cycle to which all state electoral cycles must conform. State assemblies would no longer derive their practical tenure solely from their own democratic mandate within the constitutional maximum; their duration would become subordinate to a national electoral clock.
For instance, an assembly elected in 2033 could see its five-year mandate reduced to one year merely to align with the 2034 Lok Sabha elections. This is a substantial shift in federal logic.
Staggered elections perform an important democratic function. They ensure continuous accountability, allow state issues to be judged in their proper context, discourage complacency, and provide timely political feedback. In a system without a right of recall, asynchronous elections are the next best democratic check on elected governments.
James Madison captured this insight in Federalist No. 52 (1788):
By replacing the existing “co-equal spheres of political life in the Union and the states” with a “unitary electoral monoculture,” in which states become mere “subsidiaries” of the national electoral cycle, ONOE strikes at the federal character of the constitution and is therefore vulnerable under the basic structure doctrine.
The constitutional anomaly of the “unexpired term”
The most troubling feature of the ONOE proposal is the creation of mid-term elections for an “unexpired term”. This marks a radical departure from constitutional principle, for the constitution recognises no concept of a residual or carry-over mandate.
In parliamentary theory, dissolution extinguishes the existing mandate. Once a House is dissolved, the authority under which it functioned comes to an end, and sovereignty returns fully – not partially – to the electorate. The election that follows must therefore produce a fresh mandate, complete in itself.
The ONOE proposal reverses this logic. Although the proposed Articles 83(6) and 172(5) in the Amendment Bill state that a newly elected House would not be a continuation of the previous one, they preserve the earlier electoral cycle for the sake of synchronisation. The newly elected House would receive not a full constitutional term, but only the residue of a prior timetable.
This invents a notion of residual mandate alien to parliamentary democracy. It converts an election after dissolution from an act of democratic renewal into a stop-gap mechanism for maintaining calendar discipline. Citizens would not be conferring a complete mandate; they would merely be supplying legitimacy for the remainder of an old cycle. That is not voter sovereignty, but its dilution.
This device inflicts several constitutional injuries at once.
Devaluation of the franchise
The right to vote is the citizen’s power to confer a meaningful governing mandate. Voters choose a government and legislature expecting them, unless sooner dissolved in the ordinary course of parliamentary accountability, to serve for up to five years. If that mandate is artificially reduced to the residue of a pre-fixed electoral cycle, the vote loses much of its moral and political significance. A five-year democratic choice may be compressed into two years, one year, or even less. Such truncated mandates risk turning elections into provisional exercises and deepening voter apathy.
Distortion of governance incentives
Second, it weakens governance and accountability. A government elected for a short residual term has little incentive to pursue long-term reform, undertake difficult structural decisions, or invest in policies whose benefits will mature beyond its shortened tenure. Its natural priorities shift to immediate survival, tactical positioning, and short-term electoral gain. Governance becomes cautious, provisional, and susceptible to populism.
This is far more damaging than the temporary constraint imposed by the MCC, which merely restricts new announcements for a limited period while routine administration continues. Under an “unexpired term” regime, the shortened mandate would shape the entire conduct of government for its abbreviated life. What is presented as stability may, in practice, produce chronic short-termism, policy drift, and institutional weakness.
Risk of “governance dead zone”
Section 151A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, requires bye-elections for casual vacancies within six months unless the remaining term is one year or less. The Amendment Bill, however, prescribes no minimum “unexpired term” for holding a mid-term election to an entire House. This silence creates the risk of prolonged caretaker arrangements.
At the state level, such deferral could mean prolonged President’s Rule. But Article 356(5) permits continuation beyond one year only in exceptional circumstances, including a National Emergency and ECI certification that elections cannot be held. To use this framework for calendar alignment would convert an emergency power into a synchronisation mechanism.
At the Union level, the difficulty is even graver. There is no constitutional mechanism for suspending parliamentary government while awaiting the “proper” electoral window. Article 85 requires Parliament to meet at least once every six months. Articles 112 to 117 require a functioning government to present budgets and secure appropriations. A Vote on Account under Article 116 is temporary and limited; it cannot sustain full fiscal governance indefinitely. Ordinances under Article 123 are for immediate necessity, not for financing routine governance indefinitely.
Thus, the “unexpired term” mechanism is legally unworkable at the Union level beyond six months unless elections are held for absurdly short terms or sweeping amendments are made to Articles 85, 112–117, and 356. Such radical restructuring would mutilate the Constitution’s parliamentary identity beyond recognition, constituting a clear violation of the Basic Structure doctrine. ONOE is therefore a remedy worse than the disease.
Unguided discretion to the Election Commission
The proposed Article 82A(5) of the Amendment Bill empowers the ECI to recommend deferral of a state assembly election where simultaneous conduct with the Lok Sabha is not feasible. Yet the power is left largely unstructured.
The Bill prescribes no clear criteria for “impracticability”, no definite outer limit, and no requirement of prior parliamentary approval. More fundamentally, if the Lok Sabha election can be conducted in a state, it is difficult to justify why the assembly election in that very state should be deferred.
The contrast with Article 356 is instructive. President’s Rule – one of the constitution’s most extraordinary powers – requires parliamentary approval and is subject to strict temporal limits under Article 356(4)–(5). Article 82A(5), though it directly affects the life of representative government, contains no comparable safeguards.
The design structurally incentivises manipulation of election timing. Given the potential for institutional pliability, one can envisage a scenario where the ruling party at the Union, fearing electoral defeat in a state in the simultaneous election, could impose President’s Rule and pressure the ECI to recommend deferral citing “logistical constraints” or “security reasons”. This extends President’s Rule, allowing the Union to govern the state by proxy through the governor. When elections are eventually held, an opposition government, if elected, may inherit only a truncated tenure.
The issue is not whether such abuse is probable, but that the amendment makes it constitutionally possible. As Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 59, it is pointless to say that “a neglect or omission of this kind would not be likely to take place. The constitutional possibility of the thing … is an unanswerable objection.”
In Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India (2015) – the National Judicial Appointment Commission (NJAC) case – the Supreme Court similarly held that constitutional validity turns on institutional design, not assurances of benign exercise. Where an amendment structurally compromises or renders a Basic Feature vulnerable, it is unconstitutional in itself, irrespective of how the power may be exercised in practice.
By granting unguided discretion to the ECI that may enable prolonged unelected governance in a state, Article 82A(5) renders federalism and democratic accountability vulnerable. It therefore risks violating the basic structure.
The cost argument
Supporters of ONOE frequently invoke cost savings as the decisive justification. However, the fiscal burden of elections is macro-economically negligible and cannot justify a constitutional overhaul of this magnitude.
Estimates cited by the Parliamentary Standing Committee place the combined expenditure on Lok Sabha and state assembly elections at about Rs. 4,500 crore – roughly 0.25 per cent of the Union Budget for 2015–16 and 0.03 per cent of GDP. PRS Legislative Research similarly notes that Lok Sabha election expenditure historically (1957–2014) ranged between 0.02 and 0.05 per cent of GDP. These figures do not suggest a fiscal crisis.
Logistically, ONOE may create more difficulties than it resolves. The present system of asynchronous elections over five years enables the ECI to rotate Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) units, and Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) from states where polling has concluded to those voting later. The 2024 Lok Sabha election itself lasted 82 days.
Simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha, 28 states, and eight Union Territories would require massive one-time procurement of EVMs and VVPATs – estimated by the ECI at about Rs. 5,300 crore – since machines could no longer be shared. The simultaneous demand for security forces would create a further bottleneck. Without rotation of CAPF units, polling may have to be stretched substantially, extending the MCC for months. A reform justified as a cure for governance paralysis may, in practice, deepen it.
The cost-efficiency argument collapses further with mid-term elections for “unexpired terms”. Governments will still fall, elections will still be held, and the MCC and security deployments will still follow – but only for truncated mandates. ONOE would spend the same money and effort to secure less governance and a weaker mandate.
The question is straightforward: should India amend the Constitution, weaken parliamentary democracy, dilute federalism, and blunt accountability to save fractions of one per cent of GDP? Elections are not an overhead to be minimised; they are the recurring price of democratic legitimacy, ensuring that power remains answerable to the people.
The Justice Kurian Joseph Committee on Union–State Relations, constituted by the government of Tamil Nadu in April 2025, and of which this author is a member, has recommended as follows in Part I of its Report (February 2026):
Indonesia offers a cautionary lesson of particular relevance. If even a presidential system with proportional representation has found simultaneous elections unsustainable, the risks in India’s parliamentary, first-past-the-post system are considerably greater. Equally telling is the absence of any comparable model among mature federal democracies. Nowhere is electoral synchronisation enforced through truncated mandates or the suspension of democratic cycles.
The proposal for ONOE must therefore be judged not by the temptation of administrative symmetry, but by its constitutional consequences. The constitution was designed not for neatness, but for accountability. Elections may be frequent, imperfect, and inconvenient; but they are the means through which power remains answerable to the people.