We are not in a revolution, we are in reform mode. The collective noun in this case doesn’t signify that we are gathering momentum as a mass to collide with the existing world to create a new universe. It’s more akin to being herded together and pushed to an intangible greater good—the flow of agency is always top-down. It’s like a welfarism of intent.
The masses are but passive recipients. The orders to clean up come from above, a vertical verdict. But the operation itself is a lateral one, like the swarming charge of an army clearing dense undergrowth to reach El Dorado. The allure of dirty cash that used to come in the way of a population’s neat conversion into a disciplined army queued up for the next order has since been trashed, rationed, abridged.
Since it’s upon the leader to lead the charge, uninterrupted by the distractions of seeking public appreciation time and again, tweaking of the rules of regular endorsement-taking is also necessary. What’s that, you ask? Why, elections of course.
The state of cashlessness is so profound an experience that it may seem like an end in itself to some people (a terrible end for others, literally!) but of course, it’s just a means to an end. The original objective of demonetisation, to clean up the Indian ways with money, is something no one can argue with, whatever one may say about the method.
But to have any chance of getting there, one has to not just name but tame the elephant in the room—the opaque election funding of political parties. Black money and funding are part of the same food chain, one feeds on the other.
Till we get to an actual reckoning of that, we are like the proverbial blind men of Hindoostan, sometimes catching the elephant’s tail, sometimes the ear. If the black undergrowth has to be removed— and not just trimmed to produce a pleasing exterior, a spanking clean swachh road hopefully going to El Dorado— the roots have to be struck at.
The political economy that nurtures and fertilises the undergrowth has to be uprooted. The Election Commission, the hapless referee of that economy, mostly working with its hands tied, is now seeing a greater chance of contributing to the vacuum-cleaning. Just as, at some point the church becomes the religion rather than its exponent, elections have come to occupy the centre stage, acquiring an equivalence to democracy.
The process has become the be-all and end-all. Take the instance of a parliamentary constituency in Punjab’s Doab region. The candidate of a national party, who would later go on to become a minister, lost in his first foray into elections partly because he could not influence the BSP candidate to bow out. The deal would cost him around `5 crore, he fell short of two. In the midst of elections, he did not have that much cash to spare.
The division of crucial Dalit votes ensured a win for his main rival. The BSP candidate came fourth, but proved a key factor in determining which way the elections went. This was way back in 2004, when rates were moderate. A little later, advocates of public probity in the poll panel called the leaders of our political parties, over a dozen of the mainstream ones, to get them to agree to cut down on their skyrocketing election spending, and preferably go for state funding.
After much lip service to a level playing ground, all the poll panel could get the parties to agree to was a ceiling on the expenses of individual candidates. What was crucially kept out of the purview of the poll panel’s tabulations —and thereby from any later referral to the Income Tax department— was the spending incurred by parties when ‘star’ campaigners and national-level leaders campaigned in the elections.
The cost to fly them on private choppers, the buses to herd in the crowds for those big rallies, with countless SUVs filled with minders and sundry leaders’ cavalcades, were kept beyond the net. Subsequently, we saw the demand for film star campaigners, from Bollywood to Bhojpuri, rise manifold. Some of them even jumped into the fray, trying their luck in politics. The number of national leaders a party deployed also increased.
What was a loophole to begin with became the mainstay, the primary logic. However, individual candidates cried hoarse; with the downsizing of their legally permitted spending, the ancillary trade that sustained the local economy of elections was hit. They could no longer get workers who would work free. On an average, a six-term MP claimed, booth management of a small Assembly constituency required over `2-3 crore, just to cover sundry tea and transport expenses.
This was in one of the eastern states, where expenditures are small change compared to that being shelled out south of Vindhyas, particularly Andhra and TN. Large-scale seizures of cash by the EC are the tip of the iceberg. Each voter could get anywhere near `6,000 for pressing the right button on the EVM, a BJP karyakarta wrote in an internal paper.
The money was often transported by state machinery. This is not even counting the funding parties got to keep democracy running. IOUs, in political parlance, that had to be paid back later, through policy moves. Obama was sitting on green energy initiatives, a Harvard think tank alleged a few years ago, because his elections were funded by those who will be affected. In the US, raising election funds is a legitimate exercise, done openly.
Here it’s still shrouded in secrecy and in unaccounted-for hard cash exchanges. For the common Indian in the ATM queue, the real fun would be to see candidates go cashless. Democracy going digital. As of now, despite pious talk from on high, politics has been kept above all the revolutionary reforms.