Livemint:
New Delhi: Thursday, 07 August 2014.
Recently,
several tell-all books have emerged analysing the personality characteristics
of politicians in the previous government, as well as relationships between
important government and political party figures. There are claims in these
books about power and control in government, the delegation and centralization
of authority at the highest levels of politics, and the appropriate
relationship between the political party and the government.
Judging from
the reactions to these books, the authors—Tavleen Singh, Sanjaya Baru, and
Natwar Singh—have touched on sensitive topics, which are not just sensitive for
the subjects of their books. The claims and counter-claims by the authors and
their subjects have sparked off an enormous debate, providing fodder for heated
conversations in drawing rooms around our country.
Vicarious
pleasure in knowing more about the private lives of famous people is an
initially obvious, but ultimately unsatisfactory explanation for the
demonstrated interest in these books and discussions about these topics. I
believe that the allure of these recent revelations stems from a critically
important deficiency in Indian public life: the utter lack of transparency
about the financing and internal functioning of Indian political parties.
Let’s start
with political financing. To refresh memories, we learnt in 2013 from important
work done by the Association for Democratic Reforms and National Election Watch
that roughly 75% of funding received by Indian political parties over the
previous decade came from anonymous donors. These organizations reconciled
income tax returns filed by the major parties with the disclosures made to the
Election Commission to arrive at this figure. Roughly Rs. 5,000 crore (or
roughly $800 million) was received by these parties over the period, and across
parties, the fraction coming from undisclosed sources varied between 40% and
100%.
When a Right
to Information (RTI) request was filed to elicit more details, the parties
demurred, claiming that they didn’t fall under the purview of the relevant Act.
The Central Information Commission bravely disagreed with the parties, and
ruled that they did indeed fall under the ambit of the Act. Of course, the
usual alteration of legislation to fit current objectives kicked in, and the
ruling UPA-II government introduced the infamous Right to Information Amendment
Bill, 2013, to specifically exclude political parties from RTI requests.
Progress on
this issue has just received a huge setback, with the current government
declaring on the 31 July that it will support this RTI Amendment Bill. This is
a complete U-turn from its previous position when it was in the opposition,
when it claimed that political parties should indeed be subject to RTI.
Apparently,
the reasoning behind this decision is that the “smooth internal working” of
political parties will suffer as a result of being subject to RTI. This seems a
small price to pay for the benefits of increased trust in Indian politics. It
also seems that this U-turn in the government’s stance runs counter to its
campaign promises of re-introducing probity into public life.
A great deal
of time and column inches have been devoted to analysing the relatively
lukewarm budget that we have just witnessed. It seems that it might be time to
shift the focus from monitoring progress on decision-making efficiency and
economic issues towards evaluating progress on promises of restoring trust in
political decisions and processes following the debacles of the previous
government.
What about
the internal functioning of political parties? One of the big unanswered
questions in Indian political life is the process determining the selection of
candidates. Different parties adopt different approaches, and the selection of
candidates by a cabal of senior figures in the party is not uncommon. There is
no uniformity of selection process, and often, selection is ad-hoc, resulting
in a staggering number of candidates with questionable antecedents.
There does
seem to be some progress on this issue, with a few political parties beginning
to move in the direction of more democratic, accountable decision-making in
candidate selection. Again, opening these processes up to public scrutiny via
RTI requests can only catalyze the slow process of change.
One
frequently heard defence of a lack of transparency is that the resulting
information flow will be difficult to manage, especially in an environment with
relatively immature political and public discourse. But who gets to decide what
information is classified? And who wields the power when there is no
transparency?
It is clear
that Indian society is hungry for greater accountability in public life, as
seen from the reactions to these recent books. It would make good sense to
channel that hunger into a constructive movement for transparency in the places
where it is sorely needed.
Tarun
Ramadorai is professor of financial economics at the Saïd Business School,
University of Oxford, and a member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative
Finance.
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