There is always the slight frisson of opening the newspapers the day after election results to see what headline writers would have made of the outcome. Here are some samples from last week: "BJP sizzles, Congress melts" (The Indian Express), "A Cong-less India, Almost" (Times of India), "Mammoth Mamata Mandate" (The Telegraph), all perfectly legitimate interpretations of the outcome, and testimonies to the Enduring Miracle That Is An Indian Election. Having got that out of the way, it is worth noting the absence of even a passing reference to the abuse of money power, whose spectre hovers - Banquo-like - above this democratic feast. In this instance, the absence is all the more galling given that Tamil Nadu, even by our cynical standards, experienced such a high degree of cash distribution that the Election Commission had to countermand polls in two seats.
Why we remain indifferent to this corrupting subtext that runs through the narrative of almost every election - national and state - is an enduring mystery. One of the reasons could be how this damaging phenomenon is characterised: mention "money power" or even "cash for votes" and it produces a collective groan of boredom.
Perhaps it is time to find a new grammar to alert our cynical polity to the full malign potential behind bland-sounding terms like "money power". A more attention-grabbing headline could be "Forget Panama Papers - how in just four weeks political parties routed Rs 1,000 crore of illicit wealth through criminal networks to bribe voters".
Let me quickly unbundle some of the inferences implied in that faux-headline. For starters, the amount itself, arrived at by simple back-of-the-envelope calculations. Anecdotally, the two main parties in Tamil Nadu appear to have paid about Rs 1,000 per household in hard cash, or about Rs 250 per voter (approximating four voters per household). If we take a conservative view, limiting our calculations to only to those who voted, the figure for cash distributed by both parties comes to Rs 1,000 crore. This does not factor in any other type of election expense, or what remaining parties in Tamil Nadu would have spent.
Now pause to consider where the parties would have generated that kind of cash (either from outright corruption, coercion, or calling in favours from dubious entities and individuals who have a ready supply of unaccounted cash). Consider where they would have stashed it (godowns, or in complicity with sectors of the economy which routinely deal with large off-the-books transactions - real estate developers, or jewellers, or worse). And finally, consider how so much cash must make its way from those secret troves, past the Election Commission's elaborate firewalls and into the hands of lakhs of voters, all of it in a fairly compressed timeline (impossible without the use of hawala pipelines, the same pipelines that are used to remit all kinds of slush money - even terrorist funds).
To put it bluntly, the funding of elections leads political parties to behave, for the duration of elections, not unlike criminal syndicates.
The responsibility - for why an exercise of this nature gets nowhere near the extent of attention - has to be shared by a pretty wide spectrum of stakeholders, not just the Election Commission. It implicates investigating bodies, intelligence agencies, internal and external, and our police forces. It implicates the media that is largely content with reporting election-time cash seizures or the odd case of a candidate or his representative caught distributing cash. And it implicates a public that as the beneficiary of the largesse or as bored bystanders refuse to acknowledge the degrading impact the generation and movement of so much illicit wealth has on the public sphere.
The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
