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Extended Summary:

Should elections be state-funded?.

I am in favour of state funding of elections.

And instead of being obsessed with a ceiling on expenditure incurred by candidates and political parties, we should spend our energy on seeking a floor-level fund for everyone who is a serious contender in the electoral arena, if we want to ensure a level playing field.

Since we have failed to develop healthy traditions of political funding, we need to think of some shortcuts.

Any scheme of state funding of elections should be designed in such a way that it infuses a substantial amount of white money into politics in ways that are transparent and flexible.

There could be a minimum qualifying cut-off of, say, 1% of valid votes polled, so as to deter non-serious candidates.

A party should be free to use their share on any expense already incurred on elections or any expense on political activity till the next election.

That is about 0.

Yes, it wont disappear.

Because if the party workers know that the party has access to some legitimate funds, they would be able to make demands on their party.

Well, let us consider the fact that this amount is about half of what businessman Vijay Mallya walked away with.

They provide a calling card to millions who otherwise may not have a worthwhile identity or independent standing in the social and economic milieu the syndrome of whole-timers, pracharaks and party apparatchiks, respectively.

Candidates for various levels of elections are funded by myriad sources: friends, individuals who believe in the cause or ideology a candidate/ political party espouses, non-governmental organisations, corporates, NRIs, foreign governments and even criminal syndicates seeking patronage and protection.

They are under no obligation to disclose how much money they have collected and where it has come from.

In addition to the expense statement, a daily collection statement detailing the identity of the donors with their PAN card, Aadhaar card number, and full financial details must be filed with the expenditure observer overseeing every election.

Read in conjunction with Section 29 (C) of the Representation of the People Act 1951, it provides the legal architecture and immunity for the opacity manifest in political and electoral financing processes.

Therefore, any and every political party will now claim that a substantive bulk of their donations has come from donors who have contributed 2,000 or less.

The identity of every donor to every political party irrespective of the amount donated must be in the public domain so that the Election Commission, Income Tax Department and other electoral oversight initiatives can verify their bona fides.

The Election Commission simply does not have the wherewithal to ensure that.

State funding of elections is therefore antithetical to democracy itself.

It is important to understand the distinction between state funding of elections and state funding of political parties, and why I am a votary of the latter.

The issue here is one of black money and not white money.

So, I suggest that it is easier to monitor the funding of political parties which is a far more realistic goal than seeking state funding of elections.

We could arrive at some calculations based on the performance.

As we know, the number of votes polled for each candidate, the actual votes cast, cannot be contested at all.

In the last general election, 55 crore votes were cast.

Id say yes.

No extortion.

As for the question, why should the public pay for political parties, one easy answer is if you want honesty and transparency in governance, this is a small price to pay..

Hypothetically, a thousand crores of public money is peanuts compared to the end result of ensuring transparency in elections.

Dont tax the public then and let only corporate houses make their payments to the national election fund.

If it works well in so many countries, there is no reason why it cannot be implemented in India.

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