It is a matter of shame that political parties should splurge money all around in transporting legislators in highly expensive chartered aircraft, entertaining them in star hotels and openly treating them as tradable commodities, with the sole objective of retaining power, when millions of ordinary people are rendered homeless by floods and other calamities. Where do those political parties get so much money to spend? How is such expenditure accounted for? What is the role played by the ECI in either exposing the parties’ sources of income or invoking the powers under the Representation of the People Act to enforce limits on expenditure?
Transparency in all electoral processes, including the sources of funding of the political parties and their expenditure, is a mandatory requirement under Article 19 of the Constitution. Section 94 of the Representation of People Act (RPA) mandates secrecy of voting. As a result of institutional inaction, neither of these requirements find adequate compliance.
For example, in the pre-EVM days, paper ballots from different polling booths used to be mixed thoroughly in the presence of the political parties’ agents before they were to be counted. Such mixing of the ballots ensured that no one would know the booth-wise pattern of voting. Now that EVMs have replaced paper ballots, technically it is not feasible to hide the booth-wise voting pattern. Meanwhile, unfortunately, political parties these days are relying more and more on getting electoral advantage by polarising the voters on the basis of their caste, religion and so on, when it is all the more necessary to ensure that booth-wise polling patterns are not revealed. To this extent, the use of the EVM technology violates the secrecy clause in Section 94 of the RPA. As long as the secrecy of voting at the booth level stands violated, it gives a leverage to the political parties to exploit the same at the cost of societal harmony.
by E A S Sarma
24/06/2022