The primary task of election commission is to monitor political expenditure
The Election Commission’s (EC) reported proposal to ban all anonymous political donations in excess of Rs 2,000 is, no doubt, well-intended but is totally naïve and inadequate. Parties routinely report a tiny fraction of their actual income and expenditure. If the EC sets up a tussle over how transparently, say, 5% of the actual expenditure is financed, it would only serve to blot out that undeclared, anonymous 95% of political expenditure from the public discourse. This would be a disservice to Indian democracy. Cleaning up political funding has to begin with political parties’ expenditure, rather than their income.
Every party should declare every month how much money it spent at the level of the polling booth, the panchayat, the municipal ward, the district, the state and the nation. This amount should include money spent by activists and well-wishers as well. Rival parties, the media, watchdog bodies and all sorts of non-government organisations should be free to challenge this expenditure claim, citing rallies help, posters printed, leaders ferried, etc. An expanded monitoring unit of the Election Commission should moderate this contest and finalise the expenditure figure at every level. The party should then identify the source of every rupee it has spent. With hand-held devices that can record and store every small contribution in the cloud, the needed technology is simple enough. Expenditure calls for transparency in financing, not artificial limits that get routinely breached.
Improved corporate governance and a culture of companies funding their new investments using the bond market rather than through bank loans will help. A handful of bankers alone need to be persuaded to sanction a loan and defend that decision. A bond market has very many analysts, brokers and rating agencies pronouncing on the merits of the project undertaken and how much it should actually cost. This would reduce the scope for project overinvoicing, a routine method of generating unaccounted funds with which to finance parties. The EC must think through its options.
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