Why ‘One Nation, One Election’ Is a Flawed Idea
By Mohammed Wajihuddin
Kuchbaathaikihastimitti-nahihamari/Sadiyonrahahaidushmandaur-e-zaman hamara(There is something that we don’t cease to exist/For centuries the world has been our enemies)
–Allama Iqbal in Tarana-e-Hind (An Ode to India)
When Iqbal penned the abovementioned lyrical patriotic line—in 1904 precisely—he didn’t merely parrot the popular sentiments of a united India of the time. He was conscious not just of India’s physical beauty, its many mountains, rivers, valleys, fields and farmers, peasants and pastoral landscapes, forests with their varied flora and fauna. The poet was aware of and took pride in the plurality, the diversity India epitomized and continues to epitomize.
When this celebrated plurality was sought to be compromised, more by design of the British Raj’s divide-and-rule policy than an urge to get a “pure nation”, our unity faced the most serious onslaught in its history. We paid the price in the form of painful Partition in 1947.
The BJP government’s plan to introduce “One Nation, One Election” policy contravenes that pluralistic nature of our country Iqbal so succinctly sang of. Apart from the practical problems they will create both for the Election Commission and the different states if simultaneous polls are conducted across the country, it is an idea doomed to open a can of worms.
Since “one size fits all” is a familiar chant heard in the Hindutva highstreets, it is not surprising that the demand for “One Nation, One Election” is being dinned more so by the Hindutva ideologues and its foot soldiers in media. Those who are favoring this still-born idea are shutting eyes to the inherent dangers it carries.
Admittedly elections in India are complex. But then what is not? The desire to hold simultaneous polls, both for the Centre and states, in the country comes from the same urge that drives many in this country to achieve something impossible: homogeneity. One nation, one poll, one party, one language, one culture, one law (Uniform Civil Code is next item on the agenda that may be taken a shot at) form fragments of a larger dream to homogenize an essentially diverse country. Why don’t the advocates of homogeneity and majoritarian hegemony see the other side of the frame? Our social fabric, the beautiful tapestry that has been created through comingling of cultures and lived experiences over centuries will frazzle if any homogeneity is forced in. We certainly don’t want the beautiful garden we inherited from history to be despoiled in the name of Ekrangi Bharat (Mono-colored India)?
The poet SarsharSalani captured this celebrate the diversity of thoughts and ideas pervading our land in a beautiful couplet: “Chaman meñiḳhtilāt-e-rang-o-būsebaatbantīhai/Hamhīhamhaiñtokyāhamhaiñtumhītumhotokyātumho (A garden is made of flowers of mixed colors and fragrances/There is no joy in I, me, myself syndrome).
Those who try to paint their country with one brush perhaps don’t live to see the consequences. The effect is visibly felt a few generations after the “unifier” has left. We don’t need to look beyond our next-door neighbor—Pakistan—to understand this. The country, birthed from the wobbly womb of two-nation theory, is paying the price of homogeneity some of its rulers, notably military dictator General ZiaulHaque, tried to inject in its body politic. The Islamization process that General Zia began has led to a “million mutinies” now which Pakistan is incapable to cope with.
As a student at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the late 1980s, I remember watching an India-Pakistan match held in Sharjah, often called ‘Mecca of desert cricket’ in the days when an oil-rich, star-struck (some Bollywood stars would be fixtures among the crowd) Sheikh took the “beautiful game” from the cooler climes to the burning sands of Arabia. Watching that match were also Pakistani supporters, comprising mostly expats and collegians in colorful shalwarkameez, more to irritate Indians than to cheer their own team, repeatedly and tirelessly sang in rhythm: Pakistan kamatlabkya, La illahaillalllah. Seminaries which produced armies of semi-educated but militarily-trained Taliban had found an echo in that dangerous lyric heard in Sharjah. It wrongly identified a whole nation with just one religion. Do we want to ape Pakistan by undermining its composite past by promoting one culture?
Zia did an enormous disservice to his country and his religion too when he tried to enforce expunging of Indus Valley Civilization from history textbooks in Pakistan. The attempt to drop the traces of “Muslim influences” from Indian life is as big a crime as they committed in Pakistan. If changing names of Mughal Sarai and Faizabad is not part of the dangerous game tinkering with India’s multiculturalism, what else is?
Noted Pakistan-born scholar and author Akbar Ahmed who is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, writes in a recent essay: “The attempt to Islamize the past was not simply pedagogical. It had its political roots in India where there was an increasing movement towards glorifying the pre-Islamic past. Historians, polemicists, and journalists were conjuring a time of such marvels as helicopters, missiles and brain surgery that could compete with the best the modern world had to offer. The subtext was simple and clear. India was a highly advanced and integrated civilization until its purity was violated with the arrival of the corrupted and corrupting Muslims. For this purpose, Muslims were depicted not unlike Donald Trump’s description of Mexicans arriving in the US – rapists, and murderers. Reading current textbooks gives us evidence of the widespread revision of history that is taking place. Muslim rulers are dismissed as drunken buffoons lusting after Hindu women. Their achievements and accomplishments are rarely if ever, mentioned.”
History is not just about victors and the vanquished. It is more about the people and the people in India, irrespective of their rulers in different phases of history, have peacefully co-existed. Those who curse Mughal emperor Aurangzeb should also fete Dara Shikoh who studied Sanskrit and penned many monumental works, including Majmaul Bahrein (Co-mingling of Oceans).
By enforcing homogeneity in language, dietary habits, culture and administrative apparatus such as “One nation, One election”, we are doing great injustice to our pluralistic traditions. Let the sanctity of elections remain intact. – The Times of India
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