Law as the Ontology of 'One' and 'Constitutional Reason': India's 'One Nation One Election' Plan, Democracy, Federalism, and Electoral Justice

The prevailing approaches and theories in legal philosophy, claiming potential to explain the liberal law, have fundamental limitations in terms of their constitutive structure. These end up in rationalizing and glorifying their subject of study resulting in a kind of regressive determinism. The paper, therefore, undertakes a critical inquiry into the nature and essence of ‘law’ and the ‘legal order’, as these were produced in the West, in specific philosophical historicity.  We argue that the present law was a specific result of the unique ways in which medieval authority, social philosophy, and religion interacted, causing emergence of the idea of politically rationalised power as ‘one’ (Section III), whose identity and existence in the modern legal-political systems is essentialised by singularity of law. The requirement of the study to develop a deeper understanding of the operation of power, as one, necessitates investigating, in antiquity, the normalisation of reason and rationalisation, the present versions of which have successfully reconstituted the being of human beings, meanings of life, and natural world. Accordingly, the paper develops the distinct concept of ‘Constitutional Reason’(Section IV). These two ideas have determined the essence of contemporary government, law, politics, democracy, forms of governance: state as the means of politics of economic strategies and objectives, akin to theological positions. We argue that ‘One’ is ontological necessity to establish the deontology of Constitutional Reason, the reason, in which human beings, as uniformalised self, are produced and perpetually reinvested.  In the Indian context, certain legal-constitutional policies, such as ONOE, are manifestations of, and have been used here, as the investigative tools, for operationalizing the main theses of the paper (Section II) and for studying its consequences for federalism, democracy (Section V), and electoral justice (Section VI), in India. The last section (Section VII) concludes the analysis with prescriptions for the need of deeper and larger debates and reforms for electoral mechanisms and institutionalising, regulating, ensuring internal democracy, accountability etc., of the political parties who represent people’s will.