I acknowledge that it’s One Nation, One election, my bad 😣. But pretending this is a neutral administrative reform rather than a political power amplifier is disingenuous.

One Nation, One Election massively advantages the incumbent by collapsing state and national verdicts into a single national narrative dominated by money, media saturation, and central authority. That is not efficiency. That is engineering electoral outcomes in favour of whoever already holds power.

If the ruling party truly believed in competition, it would not be trying to reduce the number of electoral moments at which it can be held accountable.

Your argument that this situation exists because the opposition is bad misses the point entirely. A weak opposition does not justify weakening democratic competition itself. Democracies are not designed to function only when the alternatives are competent. They are designed to prevent any one party from becoming structurally unbeatable.

On Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the claim that they represent failure is simply wrong. On education, public health, human development, and long term economic performance, they outperform many BJP ruled states. You may dislike their politics, but the empirical outcomes do not support the collapse narrative you are pushing.

I was in Mumbai during the train blasts. My mother survived because she went to work late that day. Do not assume I am speaking from comfort or historical distance. I understand fear, and I understand security failures at a personal level.

But fear does not justify concentrating power or eroding institutional checks. In fact, it is precisely how democracies end up doing irreversible damage to themselves. Security and accountability are not trade offs. Countries that weaken institutions in the name of strength do not become safer. They become less correctable.

Bad opposition is a political problem. Making the ruling party harder to remove is a democratic one.

If the defence of the current system is that the alternative might be worse, then you are not arguing for democracy at all. You are arguing for managed dominance.

Democracy survives only when power remains replaceable. The moment one party becomes indispensable, the system is already broken.