Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Tuesday lent his voice to the growing chorus of protests against the Central government’s ‘One Nation, One Election’ move.
Earlier, his Tamil Nadu counterpart M.K. Stalin condemned what both leaders perceived as a Sangh Parivar plot to recast the country’s multi-tiered, optimally spaced, and resilient election processes into a once-in-five-years referendum on any one national leader or agenda.
Mr. Vijayan said on X social media platform: “The moves for imposing One Nation, One Election reflect the Sangh Parivar’s hideous agenda of sabotaging our Constitutional values and democratic traditions to consolidate power. We must unite to oppose this vicious scheme and safeguard our republic’s foundational principles.”
Earlier, an amalgam of national and regional parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had slammed the move as a furtherance of the Sangh Parivar’s Hindu majoritarian nationalist agenda, which they claimed innately abhorred secularism and ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious diversity and the spirit of democratic federalism that lay at the core of the country’s parliamentary electoral system.
For one, the parties pointed out that the Centre had ominously asked a committee headed by former President Ram Nath Kovind, tasked to examine the One Nation One Election proposal, whether the proposed Constitutional amendment for integrating Lok Sabha and State Assembly election cycles would require legislative concurrence and ratification by States.
The Opposition parties had also accused the Sangh Parivar of attempting to rob citizens of their inalienable right to elect representatives of their individual choice at various levels of government, from local bodies and upwards to State legislatures and the Lok Sabha by integrating the multi-tiered polling processes arbitrarily.
Mr. Vijayan weighed in by stating that by aligning Parliament and State Assembly elections, the Sangh Parivar also sought to sabotage the political, regional, and linguistic diversity of the Rajya Sabha, India’s Council of States.
He said the Sangh Parivar appeared mortified that it would lose dismally in the looming Assembly elections in five States.
Hence, it sought to transform the country’s multi-tiered electoral system into an overwhelmingly centralised process to stack the decks in favour of the current disposition at the Centre.
