Visakhapatnam: Money power making mockery of elections, says EAS Sarma

Visakhapatnam: The naked display of money power by the political parties in India, as is the case now and amply evident over the years, raises concerns about the integrity of the electoral process itself and the role of the Election Commission of India (ECI), according to former Secretary to the Central Government, EAS Sarma. In […]

Visakhapatnam: The naked display of money power by the political parties in India, as is the case now and amply evident over the years, raises concerns about the integrity of the electoral process itself and the role of the Election Commission of India (ECI), according to former Secretary to the Central Government, EAS Sarma.

In a letter addressed to the Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar and Election Commissioner AC Pandey here on Friday, he said that the open defiance of the Model Code of Conduct by the high and the mighty of the ruling political elite both during the recent Assembly elections and the earlier elections to the Parliament and the State Assemblies, without the ECI showing any response whatsoever, gave one the inevitable feeling that those political parties in power were more privileged than the others.

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“It is a matter of shame that political parties should splurge money all around in transporting legislators in highly expensive chartered aircraft, entertaining them in star hotels and openly treating them as tradable commodities, with the sole objective of retaining power, when millions of ordinary people are rendered homeless by floods and other calamities. Where do those political parties get so much money to spend? How is such expenditure accounted for? What is the role played by the ECI in either exposing the parties’ sources of income or invoking the powers under the Representation of the People Act (RPA) to enforce limits on expenditure?”, he asked.

Although transparency in all electoral processes, including the sources of funding of the political parties and their expenditure, is a mandatory requirement under Article 19 of the Constitution. Section 94 of the Representation of People Act (RPA) mandates secrecy of voting, neither of these requirements find adequate compliance as a result of institutional inaction, he felt.

“For example, in the pre-EVM days, paper ballots from different polling booths used to be mixed thoroughly in the presence of the political parties’ agents before they were to be counted. Such mixing of the ballots ensured that no one would know the booth-wise pattern of voting. Now that EVMs have replaced paper ballots, technically it is not feasible to hide the booth-wise voting pattern. Meanwhile, unfortunately, political parties these days are relying more and more on getting electoral advantage by polarising the voters on the basis of their caste, religion and so on, when it is all the more necessary to ensure that booth-wise polling patterns are not revealed. To this extent, the use of the EVM technology violates the secrecy clause in Section 94 of the RPA. As long as the secrecy of voting at the booth level stands violated, it gives a leverage to the political parties to exploit the same at the cost of societal harmony,” Dr. Sarma pointed out.

Instead of playing its legitimate regulatory role under the RPA, it is inexplicable that the ECI should obstinately defend the EVMs. Unless the ECI addresses this major concern of booth-level secrecy of voting, it will not only lead to possible litigation but also raise questions on the legitimacy and the integrity of the electoral process, he observed.

Coming to the expenditure disclosures made by the political parties, the ECI cannot afford to be a passive spectator to the unsavoury profligacy displayed by the political parties in inducing democratically elected legislators to defect by flying them in chartered aircraft and entertaining them in luxury hotels as the means to win the majority in the legislatures. In every such case, without exception, the Commission should invoke its statutory authority and deploy independent investigating agencies to determine the amounts spent, the business houses that funded the same etc. so that the political parties get a clear message that the Commission would not spare anyone when it comes to curbing the money power, he suggested.

He also opined that the Electoral Bond scheme does not grant any exemption to the requirement of disclosure of the details of the donors either from the operation of Article 19 or the provisions of the RPA, nor has it curtailed the authority of the ECI to exercise its power to mandate a public disclosure of the donors contributing to the Electoral Bonds. It is inexplicable that the ECI has acquiesced in the political parties failing to make a disclosure of the funds received by them through the Electoral Bonds, he stated.

” The least one would expect from the ECI is that the Commission on its part, as the custodian of free and fair elections under the Constitution, would direct the banks and the political parties to make an authentic disclosure of the details of the donors, whether they have complied fully with the relevant provisions of the Companies Act and the FCRA and so on and displayed the details so mobtained at its website for public knowledge. As I see, there is at present no order of the apex court prohibiting such a public disclosure. Continuing non-disclosure runs counter to the public interest,” he said.

Noting that inaction on the part of the Commission in these matters could erode its credibility as the custodian of free and fair elections, Dr. Sarma appealed to the Commission to convene a special meeting to ponder over the aspects, which have assumed urgency.