by PAVAN K. VARMA
Wherever we may be in other matters in global rankings, in one we are right at the top. India, where 800 million people are still dependent on government doles for a meal, has the dubious distinction of carrying out the most expensive democratic elections in the world. It has been estimated that the 2019 parliamentary elections cost US $2 billion. In addition, parties and individual candidates spent another US $5 billion. It is likely that in the national election due in 2024, these amounts will double.
The nexus between unaccounted money and politics is a malignancy at the very core of our democratic process. It is the beej or seed of all corruption in India. If those who are supposed to make laws against corruption are the products of a corrupt system, how can the rest of the society be clean? When parties take money in cash, or through “electoral bonds” from publicly unidentified donors, they work, irrespective of merit, to reward these ‘generous’ worthies. When candidates illegally spend many times the prescribed limit on elections, their priority is to milk the state to recoup their “investment”.
The tragedy is that all political parties are aware of this malaise, but happily collude in perpetuating it. No law since our Independence in 1947 has been enacted to successfully eliminate this scourge. But the rapid pace of digitisation now presents an opportunity to do so. For this, however, the deceits of the past have to be jettisoned, and a new system of transparent and accountable funding introduced.
First, the deceit. PM Narendra Modi’s demonetisation decision in 2016 was meant to eliminate black money in the economy. Apart from causing untold miseries for the common citizen, the ill-prepared move derailed the economy and, by some estimates, reduced our GDP growth by as much as two per cent. It failed simply because the rich and powerful, who had the overwhelming bulk of the black money, found enough ways to convert it into white. But revealingly, in the 2018 Budget, the government brought in the scheme of electoral bonds, which allowed white money to be used for the same nefarious purpose of providing political parties with unaccountable money.
It is important to understand how this works. The electoral bond scheme allowed individuals, associations and corporates to donate money to political parties through time-limited electoral bonds issued by a bank. A year earlier, the government had amended the rules for cash donations by lowering the ceiling from ? 20,000 to ? 2,000 for unidentified cash donors. The facade for electoral reform was thus duly created.
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