New Delhi: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s statement that she has said no to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s offer to contest elections saying she did not have the “kind of money” required to contest the Lok Sabha polls is no casual remark.
The statement of the finance minister of the world’s largest democracy casts a dark shadow on the state of India’s democracy on the eve of elections.
Why?
1. India is a poor country. Sitharaman’s admission points to ever-widening gap between people and democracy.
India is a poor country, with a per capita median income which is the lowest among countries with comparable GDP. It is a lower middle-income country with a per capita income of about $2,410 per annum, and this with steeply rising income inequality means the real per capita is lower.
As per the World Inequality Lab, India’s income inequality is worse than in colonial rule. “By 2022-23, top 1% income and wealth shares (22.6% and 40.1%) are at their highest historical levels.” Worse, “India’s top 1% income share is among the very highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil and US.”
India’s politics offered the only way out of stark economic inequalities. Now, if the finance minister in a casual comment at a ‘media summit’ says she cannot afford to contest, what does that say about the ability of the common person to be represented?
Tushar Gandhi said, “Finance Minister’s admission she does not have money to fight Lok Sabha elections is a telling denouncement of how expensive elections have been made to put them beyond ability of middle class to contest. This is #Modi_Ki_Guarantee his own Finance Minister can’t contest elections.”
2. The “kind of money”? Where did BJP’s Rs 8,261 crore go?
The massive electoral bond haul of the BJP filled its coffers over less than seven years. If Sitharaman’s party doesn’t have the money, who does?
The 2019 elections that were apparently the world’s most expensive elections ever. A study, Poll Expenditure: The 2019 Elections, by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), found that political parties spent about Rs 55-60,000 crore on elections, with the BJP accounting for 45% of the total expenditure.
CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat asked, is Rs 8,261 crore for the BJP not enough?
3. What does this say of those contesting from the BJP? Where did they get that “kind of money”?
Present rules say that in larger states, a candidate can spend up to Rs 95 lakh per Lok Sabha constituency. The election expenditure limit for candidates is Rs 75 lakh in smaller states. (Candidates contesting assembly polls in larger states can disburse Rs 40 lakh. The limit for smaller states is Rs 28 lakh.) So what about those who have the “kind of money”? What do we make of this government’s record in the past ten years to have presided over a deepening plutocracy and never spoken of the importance of less funds to be used for elections or pushed along the discussion about state funding of polls.
4. Sitharaman heads ministry which brought in the now “unconstitutional” electoral bonds.
Speaking of funding elections, Sitharaman’s was the ministry, which under her predecessor and close associate the late Arun Jaitley, that introduced electoral bonds. When the Supreme Court finally ruled on them in February, cancelling the bond scheme, it was a damning indictment of the ‘kind of money’ going into fund elections and political parties, but her ministry and she did not utter a word.
Significantly, electoral bonds, brought in controversially through a money bill piloted by the finance ministry, made crucial amendments to the Companies Act, allowing companies to donate unlimited amounts to political parties, even loss-making companies. The Supreme Court has struck down those amendments. But there was no word from Sitharaman then.
Analyst Andy Mukherjee has already raised the fundamental question unveiled by details the SBI and EC have put out after data on electoral bonds was forced out of them in a piece titled ‘Billionaire Raj is pushing India towards an autocracy’. He writes, “The super-rich have opened their wallets to Modi, and income inequality has soared over the past decade. With an election coming, ordinary voters need to ask, ‘What’s in it for us?’”
The ED trail
Incidentally, Sitharaman also runs the ministry under which the Enforcement Directorate or ED functions. The ED’s possible role in politics is currently under fire and scrutiny. ED has been endowed with deep cleansing, washing powder powers, as per opposition leaders. Multiple reports and investigations have noted ED’s abysmal conviction rates, 95% of people proceeded against in the last decade being from the opposition and a coincidence of ED raids and shifts of big leaders to the BJP. Sitharaman also runs the Income Tax Department, which has reportedly, sent the Congress a Rs 1,823 crore notice, “a day after the Delhi High Court dismissed the party’s petition challenging the tax notices, according to sources. The fresh notice is for assessment years 2017-18 to 2020-21 and includes penalty and interest, sources said”, reports NDTV.
This has had a way of making clear the emerging threats to a level-playing field in India. The United States State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller has remarked on this, despite the Ministry of External Affairs calling in a US diplomat based in India for a chat about concerns expressed by US earlier over Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest. “We are also aware of the Congress party’s allegations that tax authorities have frozen some of their bank accounts in a manner that will make it challenging to effectively campaign in the upcoming elections. And we encourage fair, transparent and timely legal processes for each of these issues,” he said
Post-script
Meanwhile Sitharaman also revealed that BJP president J.P. Nadda gave her the option to contest either from Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, “After thinking for a week or ten days, I went back to say, ‘Maybe not’. I do not have that kind of money to contest. I also have a problem whether it is Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu. It’s also going to be a question of various other winnability criteria that they use… Are you from this community or are you from that religion? Are you from this? I said no, I do not think I am going to able to do it,” she said at the same summit.
BJP on “question” of both “community” and “religion”?
That is another story.
