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BJP launches drive to build consensus on ‘one nation, one poll’ from Hardoi
The Bharatiya Janata Party has launched a series of awareness meetings to build consensus on the issue of holding simultaneous elections in the country.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has launched a series of awareness meetings to build consensus on the issue of holding simultaneous elections in the country.
The campaign was launched from Hardoi district and was led by BJP leaders Naresh Agarwal and Sunil Bansal.
“It looks odd when foreign leaders look at us as a country perpetually engaged in elections. It seems as if we don’t do anything else. This needs to change,” Agarwal said while addressing the meeting here.
In June this year, the electoral reforms committee of Uttar Pradesh headed by cabinet minister Sidharth Nath Singh had endorsed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for ‘one-nation one-poll’. The practice of simultaneous polls was prevalent till 1967.
Bansal, BJP secretary (organisation) in Uttar Pradesh, has already asked the party’s youth wing to hold youth parliaments on the issue to build public opinion.
Such awareness meetings will be held across the country.
Citing statistics, Bansal said out of 1,825 days in five years, 629 were lost in holding elections across the country.
“On an average, the governments elected for five years for development work merely get about 3.28 years to rule while about 1.5 years’ time is lost in elections. Mind you, I haven’t still included the local and panchayat level elections,” he said.
Elections are getting costlier. The 2009 Lok Sabha election was ₹1500-crore affair while ₹3400 crore were spent during 2014 general elections. Now, we face another election in 2019. There is a strong need to have a common election where a person who walks up to a polling booth may mark his choice of candidates right from panchayat level to Lok Sabha,” he added.
Other BJP leaders including Naresh Aggarwal’s son Nitin Agarwal, JPS Rathore, BJP MPs from Hardoi Anju Bala and Anshul Verma also supported the idea.
The UP panel on electoral reforms had suggested that while there was a need for having Lok Sabha and assembly polls together, it had recommended that local bodies’ elections be included in ‘one nation, one poll’ only from 2029.
“We believe that the system would become sufficiently evolved by then to cater to additional logistic issues,” the report on electoral reforms said.
TWO MPS, 7 MLAS FROM BJP IN HARDOI
Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district, from where the awareness campaign on ‘one nation, one poll’ was launched on Sunday has two MPs and 7 MLAs from the BJP.
Nitin Aggarwal, the only non-BJP MLA elected from Hardoi (Sadar) on a Samajwadi Party ticket in 2017, also defected to the BJP in March this year after his father and party-hopper Naresh Aggarwal was denied a Rajya Sabha ticket by Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party.
