CHENNAI : If you have come across a political ad on Facebook this election season, chances are that the party benefiting from it didn’t push it onto your timeline. ‘Independent’ groups called Political Action Committees (PACs) have been slinging political content across social media for these parties and are heralding in a new era of elections similar to the western models.
For example, Nation With Namo, a Facebook page run by the NGO, Citizens for Accountable Governance, which claims to be involved in strengthening ‘accountable governance in India’, spent `12.03 crore on Facebook ads promoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi between February 1 and April 13. In comparison, the BJP party page spent only around Rs 8.8 crore on Facebook promotions.
Another Facebook page, ‘My first Vote For Modi,’ spent around Rs 10.6 crore on pushing content promoting the BJP. These two pages alone spent twice as much money garnering support for the BJP than the party itself, indicating the extent to which the Political Action Committees are willing to invest in influencing the electorate.
The PAC came into being in the United States during the 1943 to help Franklin D Roosevelt’s fourth run for the Presidency. Since then the USA has framed regulations on how much PACs can contribute to a candidate and a party. However, Super-PACs, an iteration of PACs, can spend unlimited amounts on swaying voters, provided they don’t directly work with candidates and their parties. Their activities are closely monitored by the Federal Election Commission.
The PAC in India such as the Citizens for Accountable Governance and Indian Political Action Committee, which paved the way for the BJP victory in 2014, resemble Super-PACS, but they aren’t regulated by the Representation of People Act, 1951 which instituted the election system in India. “Section 77 of the Representation of People Act of 1951 specifies only the expenditure that the candidate and a party can make. There is no mention about regulations on expenses that political action committees can make on their behalf,” said Manu Sundaram, an advocate and DMK spokesperson.
K Swaminathan, former head of the AIADMK’s IT wing, said PACs akin to those in the US will take shape in India in the coming days. “There have always been informal PACs but they will become more structured and will use technology like artificial intelligence in the coming elections,” he said. “There are regulations to prevent them from pushing political content during the silent period,” said a senior Election Commission official, unable to explain what provisions allowed them to oversee their activities before the silent period comes into effect.
Senior Supreme Court advocate K M Vijayan said the only way to prevent the growth of Political Action Committees is to enact legislation to bring them under the purview of the Election Commission of India. “Political parties are already manipulating candidate expenditure and showing expenditure as party expenditure. They shouldn’t be given another avenue to influence voters without regulation,” he said.