Union Law and Justice minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday told the Rajya Sabha that the Election Commission of India (ECI) needed to revisit the cap on election spending by candidates.
Mr. Prasad was responding to the discussion on a private member’s Bill introduced by Congress MP M.V. Rajeev Gowda on July 26 last year. The Bill sought to remove all limits on poll expenditure in the interest of transparency.
The Minister said the limits — which cap spending by Lok Sabha candidates at ₹70 lakh and by candidates in Assembly elections at ₹28 lakh for most States — had been revised several times over the years and would likely happen again.
However, doing away with the spending limits altogether would only increase the role of money in electoral politics, Mr. Prasad asserted, while observing that Mr. Gowda had moved the Bill to address the lack of transparency in election spending.
“If this Bill is accepted, it will surely weaken the purity of India’s electoral process,” the minister contended. “I take this point that the Election Commission needs to revisit it. It was last done in 2014,” he observed, adding that it was the ECI’s jurisdiction under Rule 90 of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961.
Mr. Prasad said he wanted to flag another issue — of retaining the festive nature of Indian elections.
“While all of us respect the Model Code of Conduct... but with greatest respect to the institution of the Election Commission, they need to reflect that while ensuring the Model Code of Conduct, the festive nature of Indian democracy should not be lost,” he said, referring to the code of conduct for political parties in the run-up to polling.
While withdrawing the Bill upon the minister’s request, Mr. Gowda said the aim of the Bill had been to highlight the negative impact of money power and not to encourage over-spending. But, he added, the “impractical election spending limits” were leading to the expenditure going underground, with the use of black money to “bribe” voters increasing. The Congress MP recalled that former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had said that all MPs began their careers with a lie by filing false election spending accounts.
“Let us pay some respect to his [Vajpayee’s] views... And we should not have a law which forces candidates to go out there and lie. A law that is broken by every Member of Parliament is not worth retaining,” he said.
The Congress MP suggested the government set up a national election fund for funding campaigns. He also hit out at the government’s electoral bond scheme, which allows donors to remain anonymous by buying electoral bonds from banks.
“If you want to cleanse the process, start now, get rid of the electoral bonds,” he said.
The discussion comes at a time when the ECI has proposed putting caps on political parties’ expenditure, which is currently not limited in the same manner that spending by candidates is. The ECI has sought public comments and suggestions till March 31 on this proposal and other reforms recommended by the working groups that it had set up after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
