Ankur Kumar
Damon Keith postulated that “Democracy dies in darkness”; this saying later became very well known and also the tagline of US based Washington Post newspaper. It’s an irony that two institutions i.e. mass media and political parties, that are supposed to be the pillars of democracy are proving to be its finest adversaries. While on one hand, India is struggling to make into the top 100 countries (IMF: India ranked 126th) in terms of per capita income, on the other hand we are already at the top of the list globally when it comes to expenditure incurred on elections by political parties.
I was stunned by the report of the Center for Media Studies which says the Indian Lok Sabha election of 2019 was the most expensive in the world. Around 55000 crore, or $8 billion was spent during 2019 general elections (India Today, 2019). To explain the vastness of the amount let me remind you that the cost of 13 central universities being constructed under central university act 2009 was only 3639.32 crore. Meaning about 279.94 crore per university. Just imagine what could have been done with such a big amount of money? How many universities and schools could have been constructed for students? How much illiteracy could have been eliminated? This list of questions is infinite but the irony is, we can disburse billions of dollars on elections but when it comes to education and health we are not ready to spend even the allocated amount of budget. Not only this, the budget of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan for the year 2017-18 was (50,000 crore) less than the election expenditure of India. The actual expenditure incurred under MNREGA in the year 2017-18 was about 55,166 crores and that of PM KISAN, AYUSHMAN BHARAT and PM Awas Yojna-Gramin (PMAY-G) for the the year 2017-18 was 1,241 crore, 455.98 crore and 7.330 crore respectively.
The current government enacted the Electoral Bond Act which deals with funding of political parties, back in 2018. However, it’s shortsighted to assail a particular political party for this negative step, as BJP is not the bellwether in this Game of Thrones. Earlier Rajiv Gandhi lifted the ban on corporate funding imposed by Indira Gandhi. In 2013, the UPA regime introduced an identical idea of Electoral Trusts to ensure the anonymity of donors and grant them income tax benefits. As per the provisions of this new act enacted by the Modi regime, electoral bonds may be purchased by an Indian citizen or a company incorporated (with KYC enabled accounts only) or established in India from SBI. Only political parties registered under Section 29A of the Representation of the Peoples Act, 1951 with no less than one per cent votes secured in the last Lok Sabha elections are eligible to receive electoral bonds (Livemint, 2019). The infrangible part of the bill is that it allows donations in digital mode only, meaning the money donated is accounted money and the donor is verified by the bank of the donor concerned. Despite this single giant positive step which is actually a turning point in the history of electoral reforms in India, the act is in controversy due to threefold practical loopholes:
The anonymity of names of donors: the government’s claim behind the enactment of the law i.e. as a step towards electoral reforms, transparency and induction of white money into politics proves to be a sham due to certain provisions of the act which make the disclosure of the names of donors not obligatory. Nitin Sethi said in his article, on this issue, that this anonymity in the provision is basically legalizing anonymous political corruption.
- Only Government can access names of Donors: a recent report by ADR indicates that in the financial year 2017-18, when all political parties received 6000 crore of donations through electoral bonds, 95% of that was digested by BJP alone. The provision that only big political parties can get the donations is also undemocratic as many potential candidates fail to make it into politics due to lack of money. The fact that SBI is a PSU and by virtue of being the guardian of PSU’s, the government can access the data whenever it feels the need to do so. Thus the government in power can misuse its power.
- Removal of 7.5% cap on corporate donations: what makes the scheme even more controversial is the removal of 7.5% cap on corporate donations (bringing changes in the Companies Bill 2013). This would allow unlimited corporate/businesses donations, even from loss making companies (ORF,2020). The law has also altered the status quo by allowing foreign donations to political parties.
The documents obtained through RTI by an activist Lokesh Batra state that the government had taken this decision against the recommendation of RBI and Election Commission of India. The latter had made the sharp remark that the said act will have serious impact on the transparency aspect of political financing. The new law is likely to create heaven for political parties in general and for political parties in power in particular, by inducting black money without any cap on the amount of donations into politics with a legal protection.
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Ankur Kumar is a Research Scholar at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social sciences, University of Delhi.
