After conducting flawless elections in difficult terrains like West Bengal (against organised violence and booth capturing) and Tamil Nadu (against money power), the reputation of the Election Commission of India is sky-high — a reputation it had established earlier when voters in Bihar were able to ring in change despite the lawlessness there not so long ago. The latest round of elections was marked by the way ever-stricter norms were enforced with what can only be described as military efficiency, made possible by elaborate staggering of polling where necessary so that security forces were not too thinly spread out. All this makes the institutional wisdom of the Commission formidable, requiring it to be carefully heard on electoral reforms; more so because the current chief election commissioner, S Y Quraishi, is particularly forthright and articulate on the matter. His cardinal point, articulated ever since the movement to curb corruption – built around the issue of the Lok Pal Bill – gained momentum, is that elections have become the root of corruption. If a person spends, say, Rs 2 crore to Rs 5 crore – way beyond her means – to get elected, then she will naturally want to recover the money. This acts as the greatest bulwark against the enactment of effective laws that can fight corruption. If a lawmaker is born in sin, she can hardly be expected to help create a regime to fight sinfulness.
The place to begin is to have a realistic ceiling on electoral expenses and then plug all the loopholes used to disregard the ceiling. The biggest loophole that exists is that what a candidate’s friends and well wishers, as also his party, spend is not counted under the ceiling. The law has to be changed so that any entity keen to support a candidate financially or materially will have to issue a cheque in her favour and then account for it in her statement of electoral expenses. What a party spends on its election publicity, like posters or advertisements not specifically mentioning a candidate, can also be allocated to all its candidates on a pro rata basis, again coming under the candidate’s ceiling. The next steps will have to be rigorous monitoring of campaigning activity on the ground to assess how much money is being actually spent (this is being done) and rigorous auditing of party and candidate statements of expenses by auditors selected by the Comptroller and Auditor General (not being done). The various tax machineries of the government, from the Income Tax Department to the Directorate of Enforcement, should get into the act right at the time of filing nominations and scrutinise the candidate’s wealth and tax liability. This will ensure that she is not a tax dodger and has spent from her accounted-for wealth on her election campaign. Mr Quraishi has done well to shoot down the idea of state funding of elections, the favourite of leftists, because that is neither here nor there, leaving open the role of black money in unaccounted electoral expenses. If the foregoing is made into a law then in the long run the country may not need a Lok Pal.
