Bring them to account

Political parties need funds, tonnes of them, for organising rallies, erecting rostrums and pandals, printing leaflets and posters, hiring loud-speakers, arranging trucks and other forms of transport to collect voters—often paying voters for attracting them to participate in rallies—and engaging personnel for reaching out to the voters.

They must also maintain offices, incurring expenditure on arranging accommodation, equipping the offices and engaging staff. Funds required for these purposes obviously run into crores of rupees.

There are specific provisions of the law which, if strictly observed and enforced, can check this menace. Unfortunately, these are disregarded by politicians as well as the concerned governmental authorities.

Let’s look at some of the provisions:

• Section 13 (A) of the Income Tax Act makes it mandatory for every party to maintain accounts of all its receipts and expenditure. Read with Section 139 (4) (B) and Section (142) (1) of the Income Tax Act, this provision places clear responsibility on political parties to provide all requisite information to Income Tax authorities, get their accounts annually audited and submit audit reports annually to the concerned I-T authorities.

• Default in maintenance of accounts, getting them annually audited, and omission to submit the audit reports to the governmental authorities, can invite severe punishment of rigorous imprisonment under Section 276 CC of this Act.

• There is also the provision of Section 293 A of the Companies Act which lays down strict instructions about the contributions which can be made by a company to a political party or election candidate, and the procedure that must be adopted at the level of Board of Directors for sanctioning the amount of contribution.

Some years ago, a very clever alteration was effected in Section 77 of the Representation of People Act which governs the processes of formation and registration of political parties and of elections. Under a provision of this Act, limits are prescribed on the expenditure that can be incurred by a candidate who is standing for an election to the State Assembly or Parliament. The limits previously prescribed were Rs 1.5 lakh for State Assembly and Rs 4.5 lakh for Parliament. The respective limits have now been raised to Rs 6 lakh and Rs 15 lakh. Any candidate found to have exceeded these limits of expenditure could be disqualified.

The alteration made in Section 77 was that where a party incurs any expenditure on election of a candidate, that expenditure would to be counted in the prescribed limit. This alteration obviously nullified the entire purpose of imposition of limits, and it is considered to have been the main factor in vitiating the processes of elections. It would be in the interests of cleansing up the electoral process and of transparency that people should demand deletion of this alteration.

In 1996, we at Common Cause had taken to the Supreme Court the matter of non-maintenance of accounts and non-audit of accounts by political parties. The Supreme Court gave a very important verdict—that when a political party was not complying with the above-mentioned provisions of the law about maintenance of accounts, getting the accounts annually to the concerned governmental authorities, the expenditure incurred by such a party on election of its candidate could not be excluded from the limit prescribed on the election of a candidate and where the limit was thus exceeded, the candidate would stand disqualified.

We have written again to all State and Central political parties which have been recognised by the Election Commission, enquiring whether they are abiding by the above-mentioned provisions of the law. Only two Central political parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Samata Party— and four state political parties—Sikkim Sangram Parishad, Federal Party of Manipur, Hill State People’s Party in Shillong and Haryana Vikas Party in Rohtak—have confirmed that they are abiding by these legal provisions. No other political party has sent any reply, despite repeated reminders. We have, therefore, again filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court, naming all the recognised Central and State Political Parties, which are violating these provisions of the law.

(The writer is founder-director of Common Cause)