The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Poll panel has failed to control misuse of money

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Monday, Jun 22, 2009
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Poll panel has failed to control misuse of money

Special Correspondent

“We have managed to keep muscle power at bay”

CHENNAI: The one major failure of the Election Commission (EC) has been the inability to control the misuse of money power during elections, according to former Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswami.

“We have managed to keep muscle power at bay, but we could not control money power,” he said during a lecture organised by the Triplicane Cultural Academy to analyse the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. “You can meet muscle with muscle, but you cannot meet money with money.”

In order to prevent violence or physical coercion during the polls, the Commission deployed 8 lakh Central police and paramilitary personnel during each phase. “If you conduct elections at the point of a gun, it is no credit to democracy…However, we have been fairly successful in stopping muscle power,” said Mr. Gopalaswami.

However, when it came to money, both hard cash and gifts in kind — apart from liquor — flowed freely during the elections. “In Punjab, the normal monthly sale of liquor is about 2 lakh litres…In the month before the election, it was 20 lakh litres,” he said.

Mr. Gopalaswami made it clear that the Election Commission had a limited role in fighting the menace. “For four years and nine months, if you can generate black money, and then in the last three months [before the election], you expect the Election Commission to control it, that is not possible,” he said. Political parties and their candidates spent well above the official ceiling of Rs.25 lakh during the polls because they knew that the returns would be much larger if they grabbed power, he said. The place to investigate the problem was not the campaign trail or polling booth but the halls of governance.

“It is part of an organic whole. You can’t ask the Election Commission to come and tackle it once every five years.”

The decision to provide tax exemption for donations to political parties had merely given unscrupulous individuals a convenient way to convert black money to white, said Mr. Gopalaswami. He said many of the 950-odd registered but unrecognised political parties were merely taking advantage of this rule.

The status of the 50-odd parties recognised at State or national level was a little better, he said, pointing out that there was no public audit of political parties, neither of their funding nor accounting.

Former Tamil Nadu Governor, P.C. Alexander, who also addressed the meeting, denounced the misuse of money during elections. He referred to a “thought-provoking” article in Saturday’s edition of The Hindu by the newspaper’s Rural Affairs Editor P. Sainath.

‘The age of the aam crorepati’ pointed out that “if you are worth Rs.50 million or more, you are 75 times more likely to win an election to the Lok Sabha than if you are worth under Rs. 1 million.”

“We have elected 303 crorepatis in the 2009 elections in this country where millions go to bed hungry,” said Dr. Alexander.

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