Chennai: The Opposition DMK in Tamil Nadu on Sunday rejected the idea of simultaneous polls to the Lok Sabha and state Legislature, terming the Law Commission’s proposal “a complete misadventure that will decimate the federal structure.”
DMK working president MK Stalin said an earlier Law Commission during the tenure of AB Vajpayee in 1999 had reported on the issue exhaustively. “Where Parliament is skeptical whether this idea can be ever implemented this redundant exercise of producing a duplicative report that has no chances of being legislated appears questionable and if I may say, useless, both from legal and political standpoint," Stalin said. “On the contrary, there is the real danger of diminishing the Law Commission’s credibility,” he said in his representation submitted before Law Commission Chairman, Justice B S Chauhan, in Delhi, through DMK Rajya Sabha MP ‘Tiruchy’ Siva.
The DMK was of "the firm opinion that the proposed call for simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha and State Legislatures goes against the basic tenets of our Constitution and established principles of democratic functioning," Stalin said in his letter to Justice Chauhan.
Referring to the possibility of synchronising Assembly polls with 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the DMK leader said the panel’s Working Paper did not seem to have considered that Lok Sabha is also capable of being dissolved before its five-year tenure.
He also questioned the reasoning of “massive expenditure” behind mooting the idea of simultaneous polls, saying the entire cost of holding the 2014 general elections was only Rs 3,870 crore or roughly Rs 45 per elector.
