‘Machine, money and media disrupting free, fair elections’

Rachana Ramesh | NT

Bengaluru: “With the introduction of electoral bonds, they have opened the floodgates of unlimited funding to political parties. It enables anybody to make an anonymous donation and there is no information to the citizens or even to the constitutional body of the election commission,” said Anjali Bhardwaj, a social activist working on issues of transparency and accountability, at the Karnataka Convention on Electoral Democracy.

With the Karnataka elections nearing, many activists from across the nation gathered to discuss and debate how to “count every vote and make every vote count,” and make the elections more free and fair.

‘Electoral bonds lack transparency’

Anjali, also a co-convener of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) and a founding member of Satark Nagrik Sangathan, explained that laws that existed said that any donation below Rs 20,000 did not require political parties to disclose the source.

This particular clause was extensively used by parties, adding that parties would carry out “creative accounting” to evade accountability. “We must know where the funding is coming from because ultimately the political parties are going to work for those corporations who donate to fulfill their interests,” she elaborated on the need for transparency.

While activists were striving to get the existing clause removed, a much more clandestine way of gathering funding – the electoral bonds, was introduced in 2017 under the BJP’s rule. “The electoral bonds were brought in through a completely undemocratic process of money bill. There were four laws that were amended to bring them in, striking the heart of political party funding transparency,” Anjali said.

She claimed that about 70 percent of the money received from electoral bonds is by the ruling party BJP. Earlier, corporations could only donate 7.5% of their three years profits to political parties but this has been done away with, she highlighted.

The then RBI governor had also written detailed letters cautioning the government of electoral bonds having the potential to ease money laundering. But these cautions have not been taken into consideration.

While the bonds have been challenged in the Supreme Court, the hearings have been delayed. “Whatever might be the outcome of the elections, the lotus blooms. It is because the ruling party has the money to buy MLAs with all the electoral bond money,” she concluded.

‘EVMs are unreliable’

M G Devasahayam, a retired IAS officer, spoke of EVMs being unreliable. “The EVM does not comply with basic and essential requirements of democratic principles, that is, each voter must have the direct knowledge and capacity to verify that their vote is cast as intended.” He said, “Along with this, people don’t know if it is recorded as cast and counted as recorded. It also does not provide provable guarantees against hacking, tampering and spurious vote injection.

Such an electoral system is tantamount to hijacking people’s mandate and exposing India’s electoral democracy to serious disrepute,” Devasahayam said while calling for strict audit and maintenance of the VVPAT slip. He also spoke of the hazards linking Aadhaar with voter IDs can bring in.

‘Reforms are a must’

“Our biased ideology, where we question the electoral process only when our aligned parties lose, must be done away with because it is being used to discredit our conceProf.” said Prof Trilochan Sastry, a political activist, and the former Dean at IIM.

He explained that the current strategy must remain short-termed, such as creating awareness among people and spreading the word of fair elections as the elections are only a year away. The long term goals such as the abolishment of electoral bonds must go on parallely