Lift the curtains

Mr Modi has the opportunity to clean up political funding

Speaking at an event in Lucknow over the weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took on the Opposition, mainly Congress President Rahul Gandhi, which has repeatedly accused him of going soft on a group of chosen rich industrialists. Mr Gandhi had alleged in February 2015 that the Modi-led government was a “suit-boot sarkar” — in other words, a government that worked for advancing the interests of rich businessmen and promoted crony capitalism. He has repeated this assertion many times, the latest being the Rafale deal case, where he alleged favouritism in granting the offset contract to a particular business group. The jibes appear to have had a telling effect, with the government quietly distancing itself from some of the well-publicised market reforms such as changes to the land acquisition law and central labour laws. It then pushed full throttle towards projecting a pro-poor image which doesn’t care much about big business. However, recent episodes of businessmen such as Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi bilking the system and leaving the country have seen the Opposition sharpening its attack on Mr Modi’s perceived inability to act in a timely fashion.

On Sunday, however, Mr Modi took the allegations head on and said he was not afraid of being seen next to industrialists as they played a crucial role in national development as much as a labourer, a farmer or an artisan. He also invoked Mahatma Gandhi and said, "If your intentions are noble, you won't be tainted, no matter with whom you are standing.” He then trained his guns, presumably at the Nehru-Gandhi family, to say “those who do things behind the curtains and wish not to be seen publicly (with corporates) are afraid”. Mr Modi was bang on when he said it was wrong to humiliate all industrialists and call them robbers and thieves. There is also no point in seeing ghosts when politicians and businessmen mingle.

But the general perception about a politician-businessman nexus in successive governments will not go away by these assertions. At the heart of the matter is the opacity in political funding. It is an open secret that contesting elections involves expenditure far in excess of what is either legally permissible or manageable for ordinary politicians. Yet, despite repeated demands from the civil society, political parties have closed ranks on this matter. It is in this regard that Mr Modi has failed to lead from the front even though he has been projecting himself as someone who wants to bring financial probity in India’s public life. Mr Modi’s government has repeatedly shied away from lifting the veil on political funding. For the most part, it has dished out measures such as electoral bonds and reducing the limit of anonymous cash donations to Rs 2,000, which have failed to address the actual issue. Worse, the government joined hands with the Congress to retrospectively amend the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), going all the way back to 1976, to evade prosecution from the Delhi High Court. But Mr Modi’s term is still not over and he still has the opportunity to walk the talk on making political funding transparent.