Political parties have been playing a major role in electoral democracies but many of the democratic practices have been missing within the functioning of political parties.
With the rise in the coalition politics and number of regional political parties, there are suggestions to bring legislation to regulate political parties. The Election Commission of India has proposed a number of electoral reforms to strengthen democracy that includes reforms relating to political parties. The Law Commission of India report on electoral reforms 2015 recommends that there should be a comprehensive legislation, may be named as the Political Parties’ Registration and Regulation Act, to regulate the registration and functioning of political parties or alliances of parties in India.
It is important to reform the political parties for better governance and to increase in accountability to people because the leaders getting elected to the Parliament and Assemblies are mostly chosen by the parties first and later voted by the people. The parties have been fighting elections more than the candidates and the voters while choosing a candidate are mostly being influenced by the parties. In the context of our democracy, currently the two important issues coming up for debate among citizens are the inner party democracy and funding of elections. Both are interconnected.Very often, there are issues raised by many about practice of inner party democracy as it has been observed that most of parties do not conduct internal elections periodically to elect office bearers and do not possess a membership record. Organizational meetings are not taking place as democratic procedures.
The party leaders are called as high commands or supreme where mostly personal loyalty to leaders is being treated as main criterion to choose as followers along with allegiance to dynastic succession.
Many of the national and State parties' top decision making positions are a hegemonic ally controlled by family members and their close aides. There has been a tendency with many parties to prefer people with money bags, like rich people, companies, criminals and goons who are most useful during elections for short-term gains. The continuity of this process is not desirable for building a healthier democracy in a country like ours.
It may be increasingly difficult for the women , people from marginalized sections , economically poor and other minorities to participate in discharging their rights as citizens not just to vote but also to participate in elections to get elected to the highest decision making bodies of the country.
The post-independence India witnessed a continued over representation of the family members of former kings and Zamindars, land lords and the neo-rich, industrialists, mining owners, traders, media owners and moneyed people from various kinds of dominant upper social strata who have been influencing the parties generation after generation as its leaders and allowing very little space to others to come in as party leaders to play a role for the people and the country as a whole. It has been noticed that majority of parties also lack social inclusiveness in their leadership positions.
Especially the women and marginalized sections and religious minority are almost underrepresented in decision making forums. They are cornered into cell leaders of their social groups such as women, SC, ST, OBC, and religious minority cells debarring to become a leader of masses or party leaders.
This has been a serious concern in countries like ours where we have lack of homogeneous social groups / citizens /voters. The under representation has been motivating people to get mobilized in caste and religion line to assert their democratic participation by forming separate political parties with their leadership. In order to strive towards the ideas of social justice, gender justice and secularism and to ensure diversity in representation which are being adopted in our Constitution, it is highly required to follow inclusive social policies. So it is desirable that political parties must adopt legal provisions in their by-laws relating to representation of women and other marginalized communities in their party structure.
The second most important issue is relating to party funds. As there has been no scope of State funding to political parties specially to manage elections, mostly the political parties are dependent on donations from public and others but these sources of funding and its disclosure have been still a point of debate and the matter is sub judice. Recently the Supreme Court refused to stay the sale of electoral bonds.
The Central Election Commission in 2008 has made a provision for availability of income tax return of the political parties in public domain. The Supreme Court judgment in ADR petition made mandatory disclosure of candidates with criminal, financial and educational background by filing an affidavit with the Election Commission. With the change in the funding law now electoral trusts are being set up by corporates to funding political parties.
The electoral bonds started in 2017 through banks mostly beneficial to ruling national parties and a few regional parties. As per the source in 2018-19 financial year political parties have declared donation of Rs 1,931 crore through these bonds.
The BJP has got about 75 per cent while Congress has 20 per cent of the total donation. Parties such as BSP, CPI and CPM have no such donations. There is no limit to donations and these donations sources are not being disclosed in public.
This a matter of serious concern for functioning of democracies and the role of money power in elections. The direct nexus of corporate and political parties has paved the way for crony capitalism and influenced pro-corporate economic policies which are detrimental to the fundamental ideas of socialism and concentration of wealth in the hands of few, adopted in the Constitution of our country.
The current process paved the way towards empowering rich people and companies to manage democratic politics of the country.
There has been a proposal by various commissions on electoral reform to adopt State funding to political parties and election which will be most ideal and the support can be both in cash and kind based on the vote performances of the parties in the last elections.
This has been a practice in countries such as Germany. This will prevent the entry of corporate funding in elections and parties with large mass base can do better than parties enjoying corporate support and buying votes by using money and muscle power.