Sanjaya Baru | Political & electoral funding: Transparency in corruption

There is no statement more apt to describe the state of affairs when it comes to election financing in India than the saying: “iss hamaam mein sab nangey hain”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently described the coming together of several political parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party as a gathering of the “corrupt on one stage”. In 2003, the Atal Behari Vajpayee government amended election and tax laws to bring in an element of transparency and fair play into political party funding. Introducing the Election and Other Related Laws 2003, the then minister for law and justice, Arun Jaitley, gracefully acknowledged the contribution of both Indrajit Gupta, a Communist Party member of Parliament, and Dr Manmohan Singh, then leader of the Congress Party in the Rajya Sabha, in making the case for transparent funding of political parties. Jaitley told the Lok Sabha: “The need for this amendment bill which seeks to amend the Representation of the People Act, the Income-Tax Act as also some provisions of the Companies Act, has arisen on account of the fact that there has been a larger consensus both in the democratic polity of India as also amongst the various political parties that 56 years after Independence, we have still not been able to establish a transparent mechanism by which politics, political activities and political parties in the country are to be funded.