BJP MP P P Chaudhary, who has been picked to head the crucial joint parliamentary panel looking into Bills to introduce one nation, one election, has had a meteoric rise through the party ranks. While a member of the RSS from an early age, Chaudhary, 71, made his political debut only in 2014, the Modi wave election, when he won the Pali Lok Sabha seat in Rajasthan, wresting it from the Congress. Before that, Chaudhary, the son of a farmer, worked as a senior advocate in the Supreme Court and the Rajasthan High Court. In the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, Chaudhary won the Pali seat for the third consecutive time. During his first term in 2016, after he had been part of several parliamentary panels – including as Chairperson, Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Offices of Profit – Chaudhary was inducted into the Modi government as Union Minister of State, Ministry of Law and Justice, and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and held the post till 2019. During his second term as MP, he was a member of several panels and Chairperson, Standing Committee on External Affairs. In 2021, he was appointed Chairperson of the Joint Committee on the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2022, and Chairperson of the Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. Belonging to the border district of Pali, Chaudhary did his law from Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur, and practised law in the High Court before moving on to the apex court. A local Pali leader, who did not want to be identified, said while Chaudhary was not very active on the ground, he was a prominent presence at BJP events. “Generally, it is members of his team who keep in touch with the public,” the leader said. In an opinion piece for The Indian Express written earlier this year, Chaudhary had backed one nation, one election as a means of saving “Indians’ hard-earned money”. He also wrote that “frequent elections require the constant engagement of resources by both the state machinery and the ECI (Election Commission of India), negatively impacting the governance, development, and welfare activities in poll-bound regions”. Chaudhary mentioned that in July 2019, he had introduced a Private Members’ Bill “seeking the insertion of a new Article, 324A, to direct the ECI to conduct elections to the House of the People and Legislative Assemblies of all states simultaneously”. He also dismissed the argument that simultaneous elections mean regional parties will not be able to raise local issues strongly, giving the example of general elections and the four Assembly elections in 2019. “The BJP’s vote share for the state Assembly polls (was) lower than what it got during the general elections. This means that those who voted for the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls didn’t vote for the BJP when choosing the state government. This could be seen in all four state elections that year and in 2014 also.” The two Bills for consideration before the joint panel headed by Chaudhary, to usher in one nation, one election, are the Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, 2024, and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment), Bill 2024.
