Indian politics being funded by dubious sources?

Fresh data on funding of six national political parties shows that 75% of the money received by parties during the last 8 years could not be traced to any individual or group.

Updated on: Sep 13, 2013, 23:27:17 IST

PTI | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Money from dubious sources could be funding Indian politics.

Fresh data on funding of six national political parties shows that 75% of the money received by parties during the last 8 years could not be traced to any individual or group.

Party in power, Congress and its ally Nationalist Congress Party and main Opposition party, BJP, were biggest gainers of this un-sourced funding.

The six parties received nearly Rs 4,900 crore during 2004-12.

Just about 8.9% of this money came from donors identified in records of political parties, another 2.1% came from electoral trusts set up by private sector firms and 16% was internally generated by the parties from sale of assets or membership fee.

“No one has a clue where the rest of the money is really coming from… all these transactions are suspect,” said Prof Trilochan Sastry, a management professor who co-founded the advocacy group Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR).

The election commission only requires political parties to declare full details of donors who gave in more than Rs 20,000. “Political parties are exploiting this loophole,” Sastry said on Friday.

The world’s largest democracy, India is among the less than 20 countries in the world that allow donors to political parties to remain anonymous.

Jagdeep Chhokar of ADR said this was a good enough reason to bring political parties under RTI so that citizens can ask questions on funding. It is because the political parties want to continue to hide these details that they got together to scuttle the Central Information Commission’s decision to bring the parties under the transparency law.

Public pressure pushed the government to refer the amendments to the RTI bill to a Parliamentary Committee.

Another aspect of this invisible funding was the biggest chunk of Rs 780 crore was generated close to last general elections in 2009. The Congress received the maximum of Rs 313 crore around 2009 elections while CPI got the least. A similar trend of higher donations close to state assembly elections was also apparent.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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