Campaign Finance Reforms in India: Issues and Challenges

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Campaign Finance Reforms in India: Issues and Challenges country. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that we will need to possibly do something or think radically about campaign finance because conventional wisdom limits thinking, and trying to gerry mander with the laws just does not seem to work. Over the years, this has been my personal experience; I think we have to think out-of-the-box on the whole question of electoral finance because, as I have noticed that over the years, notwithstanding the vigil of the Election Commission, the amount of money which actually gets spent in the electoral process has spiralled out of control. I can give you the example of the Punjab election campaign, which just got over. Going by some of the reports, in one of the Assembly constituencies in my own parliamentary constituency, one of the Opposition candidates apparently has spent between ` 18 and ` 20 crore. If that is the kind of money that we are talking about, you have a very serious situation on the ground. So, if the official ceiling is ` 16 lakhs, the Election Commision has not initiated any disqualification proceedings. The mismatch is to the extent that the perception is ` 18 or ` 20 crore and the reporting would have been about ` 8 or ` 9 lakh because the Election Commission adds about ` 3 or ` 4 lakh on its own. So you try and keep the expense accounts within that ceiling, providing a further margin of about ` 1 or ` 2 lakh. So, there is a serious problem. I have been wondering why somebody would spend so much of money in an election. One obvious reason could be that there is a certain quid pro quo which a person feels that he would get out of this by making the kind of investment I have just talked about. If you are, at the end of the day, going to be a legislator, whether you are on the ruling side or on the Opposition benches, I don't know how you are going to recoup between ` 18 or ` 20 crore. So, therefore, at the end of the day if we are going to have a serious look at the whole system of campaign finance we will possibly need to see as to how we should completely and absolutely divorce the Executive functions from the Legislative processes because as I said if inducement could be a reason, then that divorce could be a www.orfonline.org 7
ORF Seminar Series solution. But in most instances, as my friend and colleague Rudy would bear me out, it is not really so much about inducement; it is also about a certain sense of prestige, a certain sense of local influence which people have now started wanting after they have made money through legitimate means. They see it as the next step in the upward progression of not only their careers but themselves as a personality or the extended family which they have. So, the bottom-line is that the role of money in the electoral process, notwithstanding the vigilance of the Election Commission, is actually not decreasing, it is increasing. What is also happening simultaneously is that the vigilance of the Election Commission is driving a lot of this money underground; with the ban on posters, banners, the use of or non-use of loudspeakers and other forms of propaganda or dissemination of your point of view, a chunk of the money is going into nefarious ways of campaigning. Eventually, whether this has an impact or not, on the final outcome, I think the jury is really out on it. I have heard and various people around this table also may have heard that a potential voter actually takes from everybody who has a freebie to offer and then ultimately votes in a way that he thinks is judicious. I can relate an anecdote from my own campaign in the Lok Sabha poll campaign in May 2009. We were in the last phase of campaigning and there were candidates against me. They actually put out what in Punjabi is called, the shabeel—shabeel is a kind of an open invitation to everybody to come and drink and party. How much impact it had at the end of the day, I really do not know. If somebody after availing a freebie can still be judicious, then I think we must compliment his very robust commonsense and not really try and denigrate it by saying that he is selling himself short or he is being purchased. Possibly he is being more clever than everybody else put together. So, that is the other side of the coin in so far as increased spending is concerned. The third issue of course is how political parties are financed. I think there is increasing transparency with regard to general corporate financing because 8 www.orfonline.org
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