BENGALURU: Despite the massive exercise that elections are, the Election Commission of India, it seems, agrees with ‘One Nation, One Election’, at least in principle. Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, speaking after the 4th General Assembly of Association of World Election Bodies (A-WEB) in Bengaluru said that the onus was on political parties to make that idea a possibility. A day after he took charge as Chairman of A-WEB, Arora spoke on various topics including the status of voters left out of the National Register of Citizenship (NRC).
“EC supports it (single polls) in principle but a lot of amendments are required in the Constitution. We have just concluded assembly polls in a few states and if one single election needs to be held then all these assemblies should be dissolved. We need a very broad consensus of political parties because it is ultimately they who need to make the requisite amendments,” Sunil Arora, Chief Election Commission, said even as he agreed that resources and logistics required will not just be massive but will also need coordination and cooperation of various departments.
“While security forces come under the Ministry of Home affairs there are many departments that help the election process. A fixed figure cannot be relied on to estimate resources. Rs 5,000 crore has been spent on EVMs alone so far. The government needs to do something for resources,” he said. The EC’s stance comes at a time the Modi led BJP government has openly been batting for simultaneous polls to parliament and assemblies.
The Prime Minister had even called for an all-party leaders’ meeting soon after being sworn-in for the second time to the office to discuss the possibilities of One Nation One Election. The EC, the CEC said, will consider all voters who have been excluded from NRC as eligible voters till tribunals hearing petitions decide upon them. “Until the time Foreigners’ Tribunals decide otherwise, all of them will be considered eligible voters,” he said.
Reiterating that Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are tamper-proof, Sunil Arora lashed out at people expressing doubts over its integrity. “It (EVM) is maligned among the so-called elites. The common man has accepted it. It is only the sundry think-tanks and others who keep on raising this issue time and again for reasons best known to them. EVMs cannot be tampered with. It can malfunction but the instances are negligible but even there we have zero tolerance on the issue,” he said.
India will chair the A-WEB for the next two years. The two-day international conference hosted in Bengaluru saw over 50 countries participating to discuss electoral challenges in the age of social media and the need for new initiatives to deal with Information Technology in polls.