West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee on Thursday expressed her reservations about the ‘one nation, one election’ idea and said it was an attempt to bring in a presidential form of government.
“Are we going towards a presidential form of government? ‘One nation, one election’ means presidential form of government. Something which is there is America. This is not what our Constitution says,” the Chief Minister said at a press conference.
She said there were practical problems in the proposal. If the government at the Centre does not get majority and collapses, what will happen to the State governments, she asked.
Earlier in the day, Ms. Banerjee wrote a letter to Niten Chandra, secretary of a high-level committee that had sought suggestions on the proposal. The committee headed by former President Ram Nath Kovind had earlier written to political parties seeking their opinion.
“I have basic conceptual difficulties in agreeing with you. The concept of ‘one nation, one election’ is not clear from your letter,” Ms. Banerjee said in the letter, adding that the idea goes against the federal structure of the country. She urged the Election Commission “to see it very sincerely; it has to be very, very rational in this case particularly”.
In the letter, the Chief Minister said “the instant design to subvert the basic structure of the Indian constitutional arrangements is aimed at converting the polity of ours into a presidential system... The design is to convert, seemingly because autocracy wants a democratic garb now to enter the national public arena. I am against autocracy, and hence I am against your design”.
Ms. Banerjee, in the four-page letter, said the communication to her [sent by the committee] appears to be “conveying some sort of a unilateral top-down ‘decision’ already taken by the Central government — to impose a structure that is certainly against the spirit of a truly democratic and federal one laid down by the esteemed Constitution of India”.
In her letter, the Chief Minister raised the same questions that she discussed at the press conference. “During the last 50 years, the Lok Sabha has witnessed several premature dissolutions, the reason being that no political dispensation could secure a stable majority. In such a situation, fresh election is the only option. Then the cycle of simultaneous elections would be snapped or else all the States would have to go for premature elections despite enjoying majority support. The same situation would also arise in a case of premature dissolution of any one of the State Assemblies,” the letter by the Chief Minister said.
