In his Republic Day address, President Pranab Mukherjee batted strongly for simultaneous polls to State Assemblies and the Lok Sabha. The President said the nation should go back to the earlier days when elections were held simultaneously but left the final decision to the Election Commission of India and political parties. There is merit in this suggestion because in the present scheme of things political parties and the Central government are always in poll mode in some state or the other and this makes them take their eyes off governance. While the idealist position is to have simultaneous polls, because it reduces expense and leaves the nation, State and Central governments free for five years, in reality creating such a situation will not only take time, but could result in some States having to truncate the terms of their governments. If there is a consensus on the issue, it is possible to reverse the clock, but unless there is a mechanism to ensure that the dates for simultaneous polls remain sacrosanct and above the term of elected bodies, the system, in time, will go out of sync.
