Would the Ram Nath Kovind panel’s One Nation, One Election recommendations, if implemented, promote national unity or weaken it? While this is not the only issue the panel’s recommendations generate, it is undoubtedly among the most significant.
Let us first look at what the panel says about national and state elections. It recommends that they should be held simultaneously and such synchronisation could, in principle, happen as early as 2029. The life of those state assemblies, which are to have elections between 2024 and 2029, must be cut short. More generally, if any elected government in the future falls before its five-year term is over, elections should be held only for the remainder of the term. The Kovind panel believes India has too many elections every year, which undermines governance and development. Synchronicity will create a balance between democracy, governance and development.
We have four states — Andhra, Arunachal, Odisha and Sikkim — if we consider those that will have elections along with the Lok Sabha elections this year. If we cover all of 2024, three more — Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand — will be added. In short, 21 out of 28 states are, in different degrees, out of the parliamentary cycle of elections. Their elected lives will be substantially shortened, though only once. Then, says the Kovind panel, simultaneous elections will allow five-year terms, both for national and state governments.
These ideas signal a desire for greater centralisation and a more ordered democratic process. But do order and centralisation also mean greater national unity? The answer depends on how one views the relationship between federalism and Indian nationhood. Our understanding will be immensely aided by historical and comparative perspectives.
When leaders of India’s freedom movement thought about independence from the British, the dominant European intellectual currents of the time believed in “one language, one nation”. John Stuart Mill, a leading political philosopher of the time, thought linguistic diversity was a “special, virtually insuperable, hindrance to nation-making”.
This thinking penetrated the highest levels of decision-making of the British government. In a famous passage, John Strachey, a top British administrator in India, argued in 1888: “There is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious”, and “that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the Northwestern Provinces and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.”
Strachey essentially claimed that like Europe, India was a civilisation, defined as a cultural unit. It was not a nation, which is normally viewed as a political unit. Ernest Gellner famously defined nationhood as building a political roof over one’s cultural head. A nation is not simply a cultural concept; it is both cultural and political. Strachey also meant that India could not become a nation. Like Europe, it would continue to be a civilisation.
Mahatma Gandhi challenged this idea. His claim that religion and nationhood are two different things and Hindus and Muslims, though religiously distinct, were inalienable parts of the same Indian nation, is well known. What is less known is his position on language and nationhood. As early as 1920, Gandhi was instrumental in conceptualising the Congress party as a federation of linguistic units. He did not follow the British administrative divisions — the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, the Central Provinces, etc. Rather, the Congress was organised as 21 linguistically homogeneous “provincial units”. Madras Presidency had Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam speaking peoples, but under Gandhi’s scheme, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra, “Tamil Nad” came to have their separate Congress units, an idea and a practice that endured.
Gandhi’s basic argument was that Indian identity was what would be called a hyphenated identity today. Indians were Tamil Indians, Bengali Indians, Malayali Indians, Gujarati Indians, etc. There was no contradiction between being a Tamil and being an Indian, being a Kannadiga and being an Indian, so on and so forth. It was the job of the freedom movement to turn a civilisational identity into a political identity. Europe might be a civilisation, consisting of a shared culture but many political nations, but India would be both a civilisation and a nation. A civilisation would be turned into a nation not by an erasure of diversity but by letting the two identities — the Indian and the regional — coexist.
In the latest version of federalism theory, as developed by Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, this Gandhian idea — Tamil Indians, Telugu Indians, Malayali Indians as Indians — has been developed into a new concept: That of the “state-nation”. A state-nation is different from a “nation-state”. The former has territorially concentrated diversities, and it promotes two simultaneous identities — the national and the regional — without imagining a contradiction between them. In contrast, a nation-state seeks to suppress diversity.
Here then is the key question. What kind of nation is India? A nation-state or a state-nation? Gandhi viewed it as the latter. The post-1956 linguistic reorganisation of the Indian federation was a return to Gandhi’s concept. Before the reorganisation, Nehru did get cold feet. Like the Kovind panel, he thought economic development was primary. But correcting himself later, he viewed linguistic federation as expressing popular aspirations more authentically without endangering Indian unity. “One nation, one election” gravitates too closely to the 19th-century European conception of nationhood — that of a nation state. Moreover, the argument about the primacy of economic development is basically an uncorrected Nehru.
There is nothing wrong with having synchronised elections so long as the states agree. However, except for the regional parties allied with the BJP, most disagree with the idea. If the BJP passed a “one nation, one election” law in the next Parliament, it would push regional parties into a corner. A fundamental rearrangement of the polity should be based on a larger consensus, not on a brute majority.
The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute
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