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Jaitley's Electoral Bonds Pose A Major Threat to Indian Democracy -Prabhat Patnaik
-TheCitizen.in

It’s a powerful means of centralising power and crushing opposition

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had outlined a scheme of electoral bonds in his budget speech on February 2, 2017. Now, exactly 11 months later, the notification of the scheme and some details of it have finally been announced in a Press Information Bureau release on January 2, 2018.

Along with this release Jaitley himself has also written an explanation-cum-defence of the scheme, from which it is clear that the scheme, far from countering the threat to democracy arising from large-scale corporate funding of elections, does not even address this issue. On the contrary, its implementation will have the very opposite effect of greatly enhancing this threat.

What is more, the scheme will not even meet the objective that Jaitley himself proposes for it, which is to introduce greater “transparency” into electoral funding. Instead it will immensely increase the power of the central government and thereby pose a further authoritarian threat to Indian democracy.

The problem of election funding has of late exercised people all over the world. It consists in the growing reliance by political parties on corporate donations which poses a serious threat to democracy. Elections have been costing more and more over time as competition between parties for wooing the electorate has intensified; and to fund their election campaigns political parties have been typically turning to corporate donors.

Wall Street for instance has become a major source for election funding in the U.S., and even Obama, who claimed that his campaign funds came from a large number of small donations, rather than from Wall Street, is suspected surreptitiously to have relied mainly on Wall Street funding.

When corporates fund elections they do so not out of charity but in expectation of some tangible benefits in return. Funding political parties for them is an act of investment, on which they demand a return; and this means that the winner in the elections has to pay them back in some way.

Political parties opposed to pro-corporate policies cannot raise funds for running election campaigns that increasingly become prohibitively expensive, and therefore are squeezed out of the race, while pro-corporate parties increasingly come to the top. Corporate funding of elections therefore leads to a corporate take-over of politics, which is a negation of democracy.

The suggestions made for countering this trend have ranged, severally or jointly, from strictly enforcing statutory limits on election expenses, to State funding of elections, to putting a ceiling on corporate donations to political parties.

Jaitley however is not at all concerned with this issue of threat to democracy. His sole concern is that election funding should occur not through cash, but through cheques or on-line payments or electoral bonds purchased from specified branches of the State Bank of India, to be encashed by the recipient within 15 days. In other words his sole concern is not with the quantum of corporate donations but with the form of corporate donations (or of any other donations for that matter): this form of donation, beyond a small threshold, must not be cash.

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