New Delhi: India’s Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar has indicated that the Election Commission may be ready to conduct simultaneous polls to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, days after the Narendra Modi government announced the formation of the fourth panel to discuss this controversial concept.
Indian Express has reported that Kumar, responding to a query on whether the poll body was ready for such an exercise, said on September 6, that it was “ready to conduct elections as per legal provisions”.
“Our work is to deliver the elections before time. That time has been stipulated in the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act,” Kumar said.
The report notes that Kumar said that under the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, polls can be announced six months before the end of a Union or state government’s tenure. He then added that according to the legal procedures, the constitution and the said Act, the Election Commission has “a mandate to conduct the election”.
“And we are ready,” Kumar said.
On September 2, former President Ram Nath Kovind was appointed as chairman of the committee which will look into the concept.
Union home minister Amit Shah, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, former Rajya Sabha LoP Ghulam Nabi Azad, former finance commission chairman N.K. Singh, former secretary general Lok Sabha Subhash C. Kashyap, senior advocate Harish Salve and former chief vigilance commissioner Sanjay Kothari were also named in the committee. Chowdhury has said he will not be in it.
Opposition leaders have called the concept “profoundly unconstitutional” and a clear violation of the Union of States’ federalist basic structure of the constitution.