Electoral reform in India
When pressed to do something by public outrage due to a breaking scandal, a committee will be constituted to study the matter and make suggestions.
For example, in 1964, the Santhanam Committee recommended the setting up of a Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) as the apex probity watchdog to address governmental corruption.
However it achieved the status of statutory autonomous body free from any executive authority only 39 years later, when the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) Act of 2003 was legislated.
They are broken up by source (who pushed for and/or made it happen) and listed chronologically within each heading to underscore the fact that different times needed different solutions.
Lack of transparency (and coordination): The government established the Vohra committee in 1993—it unequivocally confirmed linkages between crime and politicians.
The mandate of the committee was to take stock of all available information about the activities of crime syndicates or mafia which had developed links with and were being protected by government functionaries and political personalities.
Section 11.1 of the Vohra committee report: "In sum, the various agencies presently in the field take care to essentially focus on their respective charter of duties, dealing with the infringement of laws relating to their organisations and consciously putting aside any information on linkages which they may come across."
The final Vohra report did not reveal any specific names of individual politicians or bureaucrats but only stated in a general manner that what was already widely known and talked about for years.
All attempts via RTI to get at the minutes and file notings of the meetings that were held by the committee and would have provided real information have failed.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) declined to share the file notings of the committee meetings, terming them as “secret”.
The Representation of the People Act (RPA) of 1951 provided the first set of rules for the conduct of elections to the Houses of Parliament and State Legislatures.
[1994] A writ petition was filed by ADR in the Supreme Court for direction to implement the recommendations made by the Law Commission in its 170th report regarding: [2015] A PIL was filed by ADR to bring political parties under the Right to Information Act 2015, on the basis of the ruling by the CIC of 03/06/2013 (see below) [2015] A PIL was filed by ADR requesting the constitution of an independent body to administer enforcement of Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA) [1969] Under Section 293a of the Companies Act, 1956, companies were prohibited from making contributions to a political party or for any political purpose.
It has been noted by some observers that companies continued to make donations to political parties in black money preferring the anonymity of this route.
Specifically, Parliament amended Explanation 1 to Section 77(1) of the RPA so that party and supporters’ expenditures not authorised by a candidate did not count while calculating their election expenses.
This effectively opened a back door to unlimited spending and is a typical example of the conflict of interest inherent in parliamentary legislation in areas of self-interest.
This is generally considered a loophole to allow unlimited donations by simply breaking up larger donations into smaller ones.... [1974] The Supreme Court ruled in “Kanwar Lala Gupta vs Amar Nath Chawla & Ors” that party spending on behalf of a candidate should be included in calculating that candidate's election expenses in order to determine whether the election expenditure limit had been violated.
340-343/93 Vineet Narain and other versus Union of India and others (aka Jain Havala Case), the Supreme Court issued directions to establish institutional and other arrangements aimed at insulating the CBI from outside influences.
To buy and transfer these bonds, the person or entity has to provide some authentication details to the bank but the names of donors are kept confidential, even from political parties.
In a series of articles investigating the Electoral Bonds, Nitin Sethi with Huffpost India[11] studied a compilation of documents collected through RTI queries by Commodore Lokesh Batra[12] over a span of 2 years.
The poll panel led by senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi during the course of the hearing expressed concern over the anonymity of donor identity and clauses that may allow for shell companies and foreign entities/companies to fund (with no cap limits) and influence Indian elections.
"[14] In a letter to Law Ministry written in May 2017, Election Commission stated “In a situation where the contribution received through electoral bonds are not reported, on perusal of the contribution report of political parties, it cannot be ascertained whether the political party has taken any donation in violation of provision under Section 29(b) of the RP Act which prohibits the political parties from taking donations from government companies and foreign sources.”[15] The introduction of Electoral Bonds received huge criticism from the civil rights societies and even the public in general.
Any unauthorised expenditure incurred by any person other than the candidate or his election agent should be prohibited and treated as an electoral offence (punishable with imprisonment for a period of not less than one year).
Since the challenge is on many fronts, it must be responded to strategically, in stages, and with an eye to weakening and undermining corruption's base rather than concentrating on its symptoms.
In the short term: (a) strict implementation of existing laws to fight corruption rather than constantly creating new ones when a problem arises, and then not implementing it forcefully, (b) appeals to the judiciary to strike down regressive political finance legislation, (c) popular protests against harmful decisions taken by the government e.g. redefining coconut trees as grass to allow rampant tree felling to benefit some company, would help.
