Electoral bonds are deeply flawed and more than debate, we need to create a transparent module of political fund-raising
The opacities about funding through electoral bonds have been discussed for quite some time now, benefitting almost all political parties in varying degrees, though the latest expose, courtesy transparency activists accessing RTI documents, has stirred up a big storm in the ongoing Parliament session. That the bonds would further institutionalise the politico-corporate nexus has long been established though the Opposition, which has clearly received the thinnest slices of such donations, is now crying foul. What was under the table is just legitimate now, allowing any corporation, trust, NGO or individual to donate unlimited amounts of money to our political parties. The lies have been piling up ever since the electoral bonds were introduced. For example, while it was claimed that the secret alphanumeric code would insure the donor from being tracked or identified, documents have proven that the State Bank of India (SBI) not only knows who bought how many bonds for whom, it is even required to furnish the information to probe agencies when they need them. The blackout of information has only been in the public domain. Latest documents have proven a more insidious link and a cavalier dismissal of objections. The bond movements, it appears, were closely watched by the Finance Ministry and the protests by SBI and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) over grey areas were turned down. The Election Commission was summarily dismissed as well. And while the ruling party indeed sought the Opposition’s views on the scheme and assured transparency to them, it had set up a clandestine architecture. Yet all internal communications on the subject were denied by several Ministers when grilled in the Parliament. In short, the Government of the day successfully firewalled any criticism and set up a system which implied crony capitalism. Donors, by virtue of the guarantee of anonymity, could route kickbacks to parties and the latter would have to reward the largesse of the former with “friendly” policy-making and trading off favours. The poll panel had earlier claimed that electoral bonds made its job of tracking donations from overseas and Government companies difficult. The Government had consistently defended itself saying since the bonds were purchased through banking channels, there was no question of slush money being in circulation, and there was an in-built accountability. But fact of the matter is that accountability is for a few privileged eyes only to decide whether the funds are ethically intended or a backdoor form of wheeling-dealing. Remember, apart from a sealing on cash donations, there is no upper limit for donations. The bonds may be issued by banks but they can never gauge the larger understanding between donor and recipient that drives such transactions.
Real transparency demands that the haze of doubts be eliminated once and for all. Else, the electoral bonds scheme will poison the electoral process rather than cleansing it. Both the donor and political recipient must be identified clearly. Some reformists have suggested State funding, at least at the candidate level, but that would involve an estimated outlay of Rs 2,000 crore, something, experts say, can be achieved by truncating the MPLADS (MP Local Area Development Scheme) allocations from five to four years. Direct funding will undoubtedly encourage entrants to participate in elections, clean up the system, reduce dependency on parties to call the shots and dilute the bargaining strength of criminal candidates with muscle and money power. More people in the fray will further motivate the bigger parties to democratise themselves. In the end, elections and their management are an expensive affair and streamlining campaign funding is a work in progress. The main purpose for which electoral bonds were introduced, the need to remove ambiguous sources of money coming into the electoral process and stash cash, has still not been achieved, if seizures during the May Lok Sabha elections are anything to go by. The Election Commission, too, has to set realistic limits of electoral spending, the sum of Rs 70 lakh per candidate too little to make good. A workable budget per Lok Sabha constituency, coupled with full disclosure of corporate donations, should be the way forward. Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi had once suggested creating a National Electoral Fund to which all donors could contribute. The allocations to political parties would then be in proportion to the votes they got. Not only would this protect the identity of donors, it would also weed out black money from politics. But neither the corporate nor the political class believes in such altruism or accountability. So a sustained push by the citizenry may take long but is the only way to drive change.