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Journalism of Courage
The Election Commission should see the call to the polls as a window of opportunity. During its tenure, the United Front Government did discuss electoral reform, but there was no substantive move for legislative action.
Now, with Parliament dissolved, it is clear that the nation will have to do without the luxury of improved laws in the coming election. It means that the Election Commission will have to show some creativity and get results only on the basis of the rules it is able to frame in the next two months.
If it could show progress under T.N. Seshan without any legislative initiative, it should also be able to improve on its 1996 record now. Despite Seshan, nine per cent of the legislators in Parliament and in the Assemblies are seasoned criminals, as G.V.G. Krishnamurty recently lamented.
In happier times, the outgoing Prime Minister also remarked on the shame he felt on being forced to share parliamentary benches with notorious thugs. Besides, there is the problem of poll expenses, which rose fourfold between 1989 and 1996 — and that is only the official rate.
It is patently unrealistic to set a ceiling on expenses. The political class has lived five decades under peculiar poll laws and is accustomed to circumventing them. Even after one round of reform, the ceiling in some north-eastern states, where communication is notoriously expensive, is a paltry Rs 1.5 lakh per constituency. Even in the plains, where the candidates can spend three times this amount, a candidate can exhaust his funds simply by mailing a letter to all his constituents.
This makes the use of black money inevitable. The truth is that any candidate who is flush with funds will spend freely. If it cannot be done legally, he will take recourse to other means. But he can be controlled if the authorities go by what the money buys, not the cash volume itself. Since the global ceiling method has not worked, this time round the EC should recommend ceilings by category.
It is entirely possible to monitor a candidate’s publicity expenses which, by their very nature, have to be very visible. There could be a limit on the number of posters per candidate, or the number of trucks he can bring to a rally, without going into printing costs or diesel bills. In setting criteria, the focus should be on the more transparent areas of the campaign process, not on evidence of expenditure that can be easily doctored.
When the House is reconstituted, it should also put a transparency law on its priority list. Tata Sons has already gone transparent and is funding all parties, but this is clearly not a solution.
If everyone gets money, then it amounts to a voluntary electoral tax, something that few corporates will be willing to pay. All that needs to be done is to enforce the provision that all registered political parties regularly submit their audited accounts, and then scrutinise them. In other words, all that the EC has to do is to continue Seshan’s initiative by enforcing the existing law.
