Times of India: New
Delhi: Tuesday, April 29, 2014.
Chartered
aircraft, giant LED screens at public meetings, fleets of vehicles for
roadshows, posters, hoardings and advertising. Nobody has a fix on the
astronomical amounts being spent by political parties in the ongoing election.
No, not even the Election Commission (EC), despite dramatic recoveries to the
tune of about Rs 250 crore in cash and humongous quantities of illicit liquor
and narcotic drugs, all in connection with poll canvassing.
For all the reforms
made over the decades, the latest election has remained stuck in old ways in
one crucial respect the lack of transparency in political funding. This is
despite a landmark ruling last June by the Central Information Commission (CIC)
bringing political parties under the ambit of the RTI Act. In the face of
public outrage over political corruption, Parliament backed off from a Bill
designed to negate the CIC decision. While the CIC order remains unimplemented,
an RTI application on political donations has triggered a panic chain reaction
within the income tax department. All that the RTI application filed by
activist Venkatesh Nayak sought was details of the action taken by the
department on a 2013 letter from the EC forwarding the I-T returns of 17 political
parties, all of which happened to be regional parties such as Asom Gana
Parishad, Bodoland People's Front, All India Forward Block and Indian National
Lok Dal. Although none of the national parties or the bigger state parties
figured in the list, the I-T department handled Nayak's plea like a hot potato.
Rather than
disclosing the action it had taken on the returns of the political parties, the
Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) forwarded the RTI application to the chief
commissioners of income tax in various states, with a copy duly marked to
Nayak. This was replicated by officers down the line. In response to the
application filed on December 2 last year, Nayak received over 500 letters from
I-T officers of various levels and jurisdictions over the next four months.
This
buck-passing was a tacit admission that the CBDT had not set up any special
cell to process and track the returns. The final replies came from the bottom
layer of the hierarchy, the officers in charge of I-T wards. Most of those
replies were, to be sure, "nil reports" as the political parties
concerned were not registered in their wards. Even otherwise, the few replies
that said anything substantive ended up citing various reasons for rejecting
the RTI application. For the political parties registered in the Northeast, the
Guwahati I-T office said simply : "No inquiry is required as contributions
are less than Rs 20,000." It gave no indication of any attempt to verify
the claim made by those political parties that all the donations received by
them were below the cut-off for reporting to I-T authorities.
Worse than
this evasion were the replies that made a mockery of the high stakes involved
in maintaining a vigil on political funding. For no apparent reason, the I-T
officers of Ludhiana in Punjab and Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir conflated the
political parties with the national cricket board. For instance, the letter
from Udhampur dated February 6 said : "Neither BCCI is assessed nor any
registration granted by this office. No cricket association is assessed in this
office."
The bizarre
trajectory of this RTI application underlines the opacity of the existing
system in which political parties are accountable for their funding and
accounts only to the EC and the I-T department. It shows that there can be no
real transparency in political funding unless the parties are accountable to
citizens under the RTI, as directed by the CIC.
In its
landmark decision on June 3, 2013, the CIC had directed the six national
parties, including Congress and B J P, to appoint information officers and
appellate authorities under the RTI within six weeks. When none of the national
parties bothered to meet the deadline, the CIC dragged its feet on issuing
non-compliance notices to them. Thanks to repeated reminders from petitioner
Subhash Chandra Agrawal, the CIC finally did so on February 10. But again,
though they had been given four weeks to respond to the notice, the CIC is yet
to take any punitive action against defaulting parties.
Had the CIC
forced the national parties to submit to the RTI discipline, it mighthave made
a perceptibledifference to political funding and expenditure in the ongoing
election. Since this issue threatens the political class, it will not go away
easily. It remains to be seen if the next Lok Sabha will revive the proposal of
enacting a law to get around the CIC decision. Or will political parties,
seeing the writing on the wall, at last place themselves under the RTI,
regardless of the repercussions?
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