Poll spend limit is unrealistic

Indian democracy has of late been reduced to a mockery with elected representatives being poached by the dominant political party with unfailing regularity to pull down duly elected state governments, but the travesty begins with the elections themselves. More precisely, with the limit on election expenditure and the methods of election funding.

A candidate can spend up to Rs 95 lakh in ‘big’ states and Rs 75 lakh in ‘small’ states in parliamentary elections, while for Assembly elections, the limits are Rs 40 lakh and Rs 28 lakh, respectively. It is well known that these limits are unrealistic and that candidates actually spend far more than what is permitted. Elections are an expensive affair, with candidates, especially in ‘prestigious’ Assembly and parliamentary seats, spending up to Rs 50 crore or even more.

The major expenses include maintaining booth-level agents and campaign workers, not to speak of inducements to voters and hiring crowds for rallies. Now, with elections to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) round the corner, the Karnataka government has notified an expenditure limit for candidates of Rs 5 lakh, which is clearly a pittance considering the ground realities. Political parties estimate that the expenditure per candidate in these elections is at least Rs 2 crore, and can go up to many times that. After all, being a corporator in Bengaluru is known to be much more lucrative than being an MLA from a second-tier city. Each candidate is required to submit a statement of expenditure, but it is well known that these statements amount to lies. There is, of course, neither credible oversight nor auditing of expenses.

The question then arises as to how candidates fund their election and how they recoup their ‘investment’ and ‘repay’ their benefactors. Of course, many aspirants are themselves extremely wealthy and can afford to spend to get elected to office, and then profit from it. In other cases, a coterie of contractors or other interest groups ‘sponsor’ a candidate who is expected to return the favour many times over once elected. In a city like Bengaluru, where contracts worth thousands of crores are doled out each year, these transactions and quid pro quos, which we know as the corruption eating away at the city, have become the norm.

In all this, the much-talked-about electoral reforms have remained just that – cheap talk. But a beginning must be made by fixing a realistic ceiling on poll expenditure and then holding candidates and political parties to account, rather than by fixing an unrealistic limit and then looking the other way when it is violated.