Proponents of reforms in scheduling and funding of elections must factor in constraints of the parliamentary system and the use of black money in the electoral system
In a couple of months, five states will be going to the polls and another seven in 2012. This is perhaps the right time to consider two ideas for electoral reforms that are in the air. First, simultaneous holding of elections to the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas and second, state funding of elections.
Simultaneous elections
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) senior leader Lal Krishna Advani has been saying for some years that we need to have simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas since otherwise, we keep having elections in one state or the other every year. More than once, he has cited Germany as an example that he would like India to emulate.
Though the idea is good, is it workable? In his blog*, Mr Advani writes: “In my brief chat with the two senior leaders of Government that day, I mentioned, that most European democracies have such an arrangement.”
I am afraid that is not entirely correct. Several European countries have fixed-term parliaments but they do provide for early dissolution in certain circumstances. This is made clear in the monograph on this subject published by the House of Commons.**
According to the monograph, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Portugal and the Netherlands have fixed-term parliaments that can be dissolved ahead of time — mostly in cases in which the government loses the confidence of parliament and no alternative is available. In Germany, Bundestag has been dissolved prematurely three times in the past 30 years, the most recent case being in 2002. In France and Italy, the president can dissolve parliament even if it has not lost a vote of confidence. Italy’s lower chamber has a five-year term, yet it has been prematurely dissolved twice in the past two decades.
In a parliamentary system, if a party or coalition loses the confidence of parliament and no other can fill the slot, then the House must be dissolved. For instance, if in a coalition government, one major party steps out and decides to support no other alliance, how does the government pass the Budget? If it cannot pass the Budget, how does it run the government? So, in a parliamentary system, a fixed term for parliament is not workable.
Electoral spending/funding
Excessive spending during elections has been a perennial problem. Jawaharlal Nehru is believed to have said that an MP entered Parliament with a lie on his lips — and that lie concerned his filing of electoral expenses. There are two reforms suggested for electoral funding. One concerns the amount that a candidate can spend in an election and the second concerns state funding.
Last month, the government decided to raise the expenditure limit for the Lok Sabha from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 40 lakh and for Vidhan Sabhas from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 16 lakh. Will this work? Not a chance. Currently, there is an average of around 1.5 million voters per parliamentary seat, so the government is proposing a limit of less than Rs 3 for every voter. That is totally unviable. During an election trip in 2009 to coastal Andhra, the son of a candidate of a major party admitted that the candidate of each of the three major parties (Congress, Telugu Desam Party and Praja Rajyam Party) spent Rs 7-8 crore to contest that Lok Sabha seat — and we propose a limit of Rs 40 lakh! Not all candidates spend this kind of money but it is unlikely that too many spend less than Rs 2-3 crore and it is likely that many in “star” constituencies spend well over Rs 10 crore. Frankly, with a Rs 40-lakh limit, there is no possibility of removing the use of black money from our current electoral system.
Should the state fund elections? In several countries, the state does fund elections. Several commissions/committees in India have also proposed state funding of elections and recently Union Law Minister M Veerappa Moily has backed the idea. But the funding is unlikely to be anywhere close to what is being spent, even if the question of setting out the qualifications of the parties/candidates to be funded can be resolved. Also, even if funding is large, given the ethics of our political class, there is no reason to believe that wealthy candidates will not spend large additional sums of money to win the seat. Over a decade ago, a leader of a major party said off the record that his party had paid substantial sums of money to two independent candidates with the same surname as the main opponent to confuse the electorate!
So, is there an answer? The answer, at least partly, lies in providing state funding under proportional representation with a complete “list” system. In the list system, at its most basic, a party gets seats in proportion to the votes won. The candidate represents not a particular constituency but the state as a whole. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, each party will provide a list of 80 candidates. If the BJP wins 20 per cent of the votes, it will get 20 per cent of the seats, that is, the first 16 candidates on its list will sit in the Lok Sabha. Of course, it is still possible that people at the top of the list in a political party may spend black money to ensure the party gets those additional votes which may result in them getting on the list of members to sit in the Lok Sabha. But it is quite likely that a large majority of people in the lower orders of the lists will have no incentive to spend black money.
Under the first-past-the-post system, given the criminalisation of politics of India, any reform of political funding is unlikely to eliminate the use of black money.
*http://blog.lkadvani.in/blog-in-english/fixed-tenure-for-loksabha-and-state-assemblies]
**http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-05530.pdf
