POLITICS-INDIA: Law to Clean up Election Spending Impresses Few

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 8 2003 (IPS) - While India’s Parliament made legal this week the funding of political parties by private corporations and individuals, few believe that this would make a dent on the country’s vast parallel economy that survives on political patronage.

”This is a gimmick in an election yearàreal political will to clean up the system is still nowhere in sight,” Vineet Narain, the country’s best-known crusader against political corruption, told IPS in an interview.

The crux of the problem, said Narain, lay in the fact that top politicians and bureaucrats remain unaccountable.

He said they have protected themselves very well from cases brought up against them, so that the bill passed by Parliament – designed to legitimise political contributions and undercut the incentive to raise money through illegal sources – has little chance of changing this problem.

Narain himself spent years in the unsuccessful litigation of top Indian politicians including Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani who were charged by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the country’s premier sleuthing agency, for having received funds sourced from outside the country through illegal channels.

Narain said there is no dearth of legislation or even institutions to fight corruption. ”We have the CBI and also the office of the Chief Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), but all of these are controlled by the political masters and higher bureaucracy à so the real question is who will mind the minders?”

According to N Vittal, a senior bureaucrat who served a controversial four-year term as CVC before retiring in September last year, the main obstacle in the fight against corruption remains red tape.

Vittal reckons that at least 40 percent of India’s GDP consists of unaccounted ‘black money’, which plays an important role in the funding of political parties. It is not only self-perpetuating but constantly growing in size, he adds.

Speaking during the debate which preceded the passage of the Election and Other Related Laws (Amendment) bill on Monday, Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley said the new legislation, which envisages changes in existing election, income tax and corporate laws, was meant to help clean up the election process.

Jaitley said it was regrettable that 56 years after the country attained independence, there was no transparent mechanism by which political parties could be legitimately funded. This, he added, compelled them to look to ‘black money’ to meet their day-to-day expenses.

But this has not been for want of trying. Since the early sixties, various committees have been working on tackling the issue of ”Indian politics becoming increasingly capital-intensive,” as the noted economist K N Raj put it.

The difficulty was that political parties would quickly close ranks to defy any proposal suggested by various committees or by high functionaries such as the powerful chief election commissioner (CEC), a statutory post.

One of the most assertive of CECs, T N Seshan, laid down limits to electoral spending and went to the point of recommending that election candidates caught violating the limits should be debarred from contesting for the next six years.

Sanjay Kapoor, managing editor of the ‘Delhi Mid-Day’ group of publications and considered an authority on the phenomenon of ‘black money’ in politics, said ceilings on election spending were not realistic.

The plain fact was that candidates had to spend vast sums to adequately cover their constituencies, he explained.

Kapoor said fighting an election in India was far different from that in the western democracies. In this country, candidates had to travel vast distances with no benefit of such devices such as the television to get their messages across to potential voters.

”The new bill is not a bad idea and would help bring some level of transparency, but elections are getting costlier by the day,” he said.

Besides, Kapoor said, party workers are not motivated by ideology or a spirit of voluntarism and have to be paid salaries and then, of course, many actually make fortunes out of being in politics.

”It needs to be asked how people Lal Krishna Advani came by their great wealth when they have never held down any job in years or had any known source of legitimate income,” he said.

An important part of the bill was tax incentives for corporations that made donations or political contributions to recognised political parties.

”This partly meets the demand made by several people that the state itself should be funding political parties and meeting their electoral expenses since tax breaks would go out of government revenues,” said Pranab Mukherjee, former finance minister and leader of the opposition Congress party.

Another welcome provision under the bill is direct broadcast time offered on state-run television channels which, according to Mukherjee, could be seen as a kind of state contribution.

The bill has borrowed from the practice of electoral funding in several European countries including Sweden, Germany and Italy, but Narain pointed out that even in these countries, parties and candidates have received funds from illegitimate sources.

”There has been no attempt to tackle the menace of black money itself and a candidate now has the choice of both legitimate and illegitimate funds – and the odds are that candidates with access to the latter will win an election,” he said.