Election Commission plans unit to curb poll-spend fudging

The election commission (EC) is planning to set up an expenditure monitoring division in collaboration with the Income Tax department to address the disparity between the actual expenditure incurred by contestants in elections and what they disclose before the EC.

Candidates in the parliamentary and assembly polls overshoot the expenditure bar set by the EC by a huge margin, but while submitting details of expenses they usually fudge figures to show that they have stayed within the limit. The new division is designed to ferret out the correct figures.

“The proposed division would scrutinise election expenditure by candidates and political parties with the help of the I-T department,’’ said an EC official. It would monitor actual expenditure and juxtapose it with those disclosed by candidates to their respective district election officers, he added. 

“The current system puts the onus of revealing the expenditure on the candidate. Obviously, it has not worked. The proposed division is an attempt to plug the loopholes in the existing system,” he said.

On Thursday, DNA had reported the official expenditures of political parties in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, where Congress, at Rs380 crore, had outstripped the others even as chief rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had still disclose its spend.

The EC is also considering proposals under which any expense incurred for a particular candidate by his party or ‘friends and fan clubs’ would automatically be credited to the candidate’s expense account.

 “Once expenditure is proved, the presumption should be that it was incurred with the consent of the candidate and must automatically be credited to his/her account. Currently, candidates get away by saying that their hoardings or posters had been put up by their party, or friends/followers and thus those expenses mustn’t be credited to them,” the official said.

However, though the proposals look sound, the big question is whether there would be political will to back it. Those who have been associated closely with the EC view the agenda with scepticism.

“Successive governments have lacked the political will to implement electoral reforms. Several reforms have been suggested from time to time but hardly any have been implemented. The proposal for setting up the expenditure monitoring division has also been long pending. I doubt the government, which comprises elected representatives, would want a stern watchdog over them,” says KJ Rao, a former election observer.

Rao had been credited with conducting one of the ‘fairest’ polls in Bihar during the rule of chief minister Lalu Prasad.

Rao presently works with Foundation for Advanced Management of Elections (Fame), an NGO set up by former chief election commissioners JM Lyngdoh and TS Krishnamurthy. In November last year, Fame had organised its first national seminar on electoral reforms which saw Lyngdoh, Krishnamurthy and former chief election commissioner N Gopalaswamy discuss the ‘reform agenda’ with members of the current CEC and Union law and justice minister Veerappa Moily.

“The recommendations that emanated from the seminar are now being compiled into a book and would be presented to the CEC and the law ministry for their perusal by early next month. We can only hope that something good will come off it,” Rao said.

The foundation has recommended, among other things, powers to the EC to deregister political parties, amendments to the Representation of People’s act to make provisions for stringent punishment to candidates violating expenditure guidelines, debarring them from electoral race for at least five years as against the existing bar of three years and proposals on decriminalising the electoral system.

“Although I have had a long association with the EC, I feel embarrassed to say that it is a largely toothless body. It can set the model code of conduct for the polls but can hardly penalise candidates and parties for violating that code,’’ said Rao.

Election commissioner SY Qureshi put it with a touch of sarcasm. “You can accuse our governments of anything but not of being inconsistent. Successive governments have been more than consistent in sitting over electoral reforms,” Qureshi said.