Campaign Finance Reforms in India: Issues and Challenges

ORF Seminar Series
Opening Remarks by the Chair:
Dr. E. Sridharan, Academic Director, Centre for Advanced Study of India,
University of Pennsylvania
As you are all aware, campaign finance reforms in India is a vital issue and
actually we should not just be discussing campaign finance, which is specifically
an American term, but also party finance. After all, it is not only about electionfunding,
but also about finance for sustaining parties even between elections. It
is essentially about party-funding, and election-funding should be considered as
a sub-text as it crops up whenever there are elections. There has been a wealth of
experience on party and election funding reforms in long-standing democracies
around the world; India, I think, can fruitfully study some of these experiences
and selectively pick and choose. Ultimately, India has to frame its own system
and design its own reforms in this regard.
Traditionally, there are four major types of regulation on election-funding. One
is on limits on expenditure; second is on limits on contributions, whether
contributions from individuals, companies, trade unions or for political action
committees like in the US; the third relates to various forms of State funding—it
can be all-out State funding, or it can be partial State-funding or partial subsidy,
sometimes on a reimbursement basis after elections—and the fourth on various
systems of reporting and disclosure, which also includes, in some countries,
legislation by which parties have to conduct their internal affairs. The parties
have to be internally democratic and have accountability mechanisms. So, these
are the four broad categories of regulation which usually cover the area of
campaign and party finance.
Mr. Manish Tewari (Member of Parliament, Indian National Congress)
Over the past three decades as a political activist I have fought, won and lost a
couple of elections, and participated in various election campaigns across the
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