BUSINESS OF ELECTIONS

By Swati Reddy & Ayaan Khan

Elections cost crores. But the Mumbai attacks show that the politicians we elect fail us. HNN does a cost-benefit analysis.

Even as citizens rail against politicians in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks, an important electoral exercise is on in the country. Five states are in the midst of choosing legislative representatives, in a process that is seen as a dress rehearsal for next year’s battle for the Lok Sabha. Terror is — and will continue to be — a key issue as is already evident from advertisements issued by both the main political parties. But post-26/11, disillusioned voters are questioning the very exercise that is fundamental to democracy — elections. At a protest near the Gateway of India in Mumbai last week, some even advocated a no-vote option in the forthcoming general elections. “That is the only way people can register their lack of faith in the political class,” said Naina, a college student who was sporting a T-shirt that read ‘No vote, no taxes’.

Could Naina and others like her to mark the coming of age of the Indian voter? Gone is the indifference to the political process; in its place is serious thought to the candidates standing for election. After all, elections are serious business. In 2004, it cost the public purse nearly Rs 1,300 crore to stage a general election. And that was just the expense incurred by the Election Commission. It doesn’t include the phenomenal amounts spent on campaigning. Arun Kumar, economics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, has studied the impact of corruption on the electoral process. He estimates that the election economy is worth roughly Rs 10,000 crore.

“It’s only going up and up,” says N Bhaskar Rao, chairman of the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), a not-for-profit research firm. According to estimates by CMS, anywhere between Rs 12,000 crore and Rs 16,000 crore will be spent on the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

Assembly elections are not about the small change either. In the Karnataka assembly elections in May, hard cash, liquor and goodies worth Rs 45.57 crore were seized during the campaign. “It’s the highest value (by a wide margin) in any election to a state in my four years in the EC,” admitted N Gopalaswami, chief election commissioner.

He went on to describe big spending in elections as a sign of the rot within, ie festering corruption. “If a candidate is willing to spend 10 times more than the prescribed ceiling, it is not out of philanthropy but in the secure knowledge that he can earn 10 times what he spends once he gets power.”

Officially, EC guidelines allow assembly election candidates to spend just Rs 12 lakh on their campaign. Of this, Rs 4 lakh must be set aside for national or state-level leaders to campaign.

But the remaining eight lakh “is just the cost of hiring a chopper for a day” laments a campaign manager. He organised a ‘cheel gaadi’ (as tribals in Madhya Pradesh described the Bell 407 helicopter that landed in their village) to ferry a national leader around. Campaign costs become larger with enhanced ad spend, vehicle hire, freebies such as saris and the expense of arranging for a celebrity to appear at public meetings.

It’s a losing battle for those without lots of ready cash. Udit Raj, president of the newly founded Justice Party whose candidates contested from six constituencies in Delhi, isn’t waiting for the results. He already knows the outcome, because his campaign flopped when workers deserted the party and joined the opposition. The money was a lot better there and there were perks such as mobile phones, a daily allowance of Rs 500 and unlimited liquor supplies. Raj, who quit as income-tax commissioner last year to make politics a full-time career, is now having second thoughts. “Elections have become a total farce. It is money that matters. Ideology alone cannot win you an election.”

Indeed, money can’t buy you love, as the saying goes, but it goes a long way when you are fighting an election. Barack Obama may have just proved this, spending a whopping $1.5 billion on his campaign and making this the most expensive race for the White House ever. But Obama used the Internet to lobby ordinary voters to sign small cheques. In India, it is unaccounted money that makes for deep party coffers.

An application under the Right to Information Act revealed that almost all India’s political parties still get a large chunk of their funding from undisclosed sources. In real terms, it means that 16 of the country’s largest political parties collected more than Rs 400 crore in 2006-07 (though figures for NCP and RJD were for 2005-06), of which less than Rs 16 crore listed the source.

Political accountability and transparency have been a long and losing battle for many. Former prime minister V P Singh tried to legislate to force election spending to be restricted to chequepayment, but he didn't succeed. “What a third person spends on a candidate is not counted so one can actually spend as much as one wants on a campaign,”' says Anil Bairwal of Association of Democratic Reforms. ADR, an NGO, filed the request that resulted in the Central Information Commission order that all political parties should disclose their income-tax returns. The decision is significant, since, in 2006-07, only 14 of the 50 recognised and 900 unrecognised parties disclosed their accounts to the EC.

Disclosed or not, the money flows freely in election season. But aren't these the costs of democracy and shouldn't we be happy to pay? Not if it means MPs and MLAs who fail us. “This time, people are angry with politicians across parties... and I don’t think this feeling is momentary. What happened in Mumbai is not just another attack; it is a clarion call to politicians that they have to get their act together,” says poet, author Javed Akhtar.

A placard outside the fire-blackened Taj Mahal Hotel said it all: “We must rebuild what has been destroyed — Taj, Oberoi, people’s faith in government.”

While anger can replace government with another, it doesn’t bring change. This can only come through the democratic process, stresses Zoya Hasan, professor of politics at JNU. “We must realise that with all its distortions, there is no alternative to democracy and elections. Elections matter and they matter even more so in a situation like this.”