Campaign Finance Reforms in India: Issues and Challenges

ORF Seminar Series
levels, and make it open to challenge by watchdog bodies and by other political
parties, and institute an expanded body of the Election Commission as the
moderator who will actually validate the expenditure, things can change. Sure,
some money that is spent on buying drugs that are illegal might not be reflected
but a large part of the expenditure of political parties would be reflected
because other parties and watchdog bodies could contest the low claim of any
party. This expenditure should be explained in terms of source. There is no
reason why this cannot be done.
You might say Mayawati claims that the vast majority of the money she collected
came through small contributions from people and could not be recorded. This
might have been a possible excuse 20 years ago. Today, it is possible to have
small, hand-held machines that can be connected to some computer server that
can record every single contribution by any donor, even in smaller
denominations of ` 5 and ` 10, and generate a receipt for it. The question is: do
we have the political will to do this? We have already reformed the economy to a
large extent. State discretion now exists only in some sectors, primarily land and
mining lease, or wherever natural assets are involved. The more you bring in
rules of transparency in conducting Government business and reduce the role
of arbitrary discretion, more transparency will prevail in political funding. The
reason why there is so much of support for Anna Hazare and his reformers is
because now those sections of society have emerged which are prospering
without any Government patronage. They are victims of extortion; they pay
money to politicians and to civil servants. They are doing it not because they
have got patronage but because they are victims, they just have to pay. They are
actually getting nothing from the system but they are made to pay, and this is
getting articulated as support for the demand for a Lok Pal.
It is completely within our ability to clean up the system, starting from
monitoring expenditure to forcing parties to disclose their sources of finance.
We should regulate political parties, have a separate law to govern the conduct
of political parties, make inner-party democracy mandatory, make selection of
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