Book review: Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav,eds. Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India

The Indian democracy has often been described as precarious and fragile. The idioms in which politics in India is conducted have been considered incomprehensible and inscrutable by some scholars. Others have argued that the culture of politics in India is distinctive, marked by enduring traditions of trust, tolerance and pluralism. These traditions, they argue, have made Indian democracy inherently stable, despite the conflicts that characterize the institutional space of democracy. More recently, the institutional space of democracy has been described in terms of dissonance, referring to the growing distrust of political institutions and politicians among people, even as their enhanced participation in elections has led to the consolidation of the electoral system. Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav’s anthology on political finance in India opens up the possibility of understanding the processes through which this dissonance gets installed in Indian democracy.

How much does democracy cost in India? Kapur and Vaishnav inform us that the ‘price tag’ of the 2014 general election in India was US$5 billion—more than double the amount spent in 2009 (p. 4). The increase in election spending, they argue, corresponds with heightened electoral competition and decrease in the margins of victory, and has an impact upon who contests elections, electoral outcomes, and policy preferences of political regimes. It is interesting that, while the Election Commission of India has consistently scored high in international ratings for its efficiency as an election management body, India has scored abysmally low on the regulation of political finance, placed in the 12th position from the bottom at a low score of 31 per cent (p. 8). The paradox of having an effective institutional machinery for conducting elections and a weak regulatory regime to control political finance may possibly be traced to the ambivalence in the Constitution of India. While making the Election Commission, the primary body responsible for conducting elections, the Constitution simultaneously gives the Parliament the power to make laws to regulate the electoral domain. The contest between the Election Commission of India and the Parliament over governing the electoral domain has manifested itself in several contexts—over the question of criminalization of the electoral domain, the requirement for disclosure of assets and criminal pasts for those contesting elections and disqualification of convicted MPs from membership of Parliament.

As per the Election Commission data, the government spent ₹12 per person in the 2009 general election. The ‘cost’ that this volume is concerned with, however, is not associated with the costs of holding elections, but the amount spent by candidates in elections, which is regulated by the Election Commission, and that spent by political parties in election campaigns, which remains outside the regulatory regime of the election commission. The regulation of the amount of money that can be spent, the source from which it can be obtained and the requirement of reporting and disclosure, have remained festering concerns in the history of electoral reforms in India. Apart from tracing the history of reforms in political finance in India, this book has thick ethnographical studies and granular data on the movement of money in elections, collected, in most cases, over a period of several years covering elections at different layers of the government, along different scales and sites. The field studies in the volume trace the ubiquitous spread of money in elections—from the power that wealth wields in the process of candidate selection to the various uses money is put into during election campaigns, and the microprocesses through which electoral competition channelled through money work.

Earlier works have established the correlation between increasing costs of elections and attempts by political parties to seek financial ‘rents’ to meet election costs, often by putting up candidates who bring resources into the party. In this volume, Neelanjan Sircar explains the ‘selection effect’ personal wealth has on determining who contests elections. Indeed, in a competition among wealthy candidates, the one who spends most is also likely to win. The movement of money, its source and destination, has been mapped innovatively by Kapur and Vaishnav who study the data of cement consumption along electoral cycles to show the nexus between politicians and the construction sector, which is arguably among one of the most corrupt sectors in the country. Yet, the presumption that the money spent in elections is necessarily spent illegitimately is ‘simplistic’ and also ‘erroneous’, argues Simon Chauchard, since elections have become expensive to run in India due to, among other reasons, the steady increase in population and constituency sizes. Lisa Björkman and Jeffrey Witsoe, however, consider money as only one of the several transactions that occur during election time. The ‘anthropology of money’, they argue, helps understand democratic representation in terms of socio-material relations in which questions of trust become significant and influence the spawning of horizontal and vertical relationship between the voters and the candidates. In somewhat similar vein, Jennifer Bussell’s study opens up for scrutiny the relationship between the level of government and sources of money available for those contesting elections at different levels, and the degree of influence that political parties can, as a result, exercise on the elected government. The studies in the volume can, therefore, also be seen as presenting evaluative frameworks putting the electoral system itself to scrutiny. Michael Collins’ study of the negotiations between marginal and bigger political parties shows how, even when there may not be an exchange of votes for money, distortion of electoral representation takes place through candidate selection processes, which impacts the larger contours of electoral competition itself.

In their co-authored chapter tracing the history of political finance regime in India, E. Sridharan and Milan Vaishnav see political finance as ultimately ‘a collective action problem’ calling for the ‘right alignment of incentives’ among political parties and donors. It is not clear, however, how an effective alliance for collective action can possibly be achieved in a context where the decreased certainty of capture of state power due to the proliferation of political actors would lower the incentive to bargain. The other possibility the authors offer is of a political consensus of the kind witnessed in the emergence of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). Interestingly, however, the political consensus implicit in the MCC suggests a political morality of a kind that is different from the rational choice action demanded by collective action problem solving. It may also, as in the case of MCC, have the consequence of buttressing the regulatory powers of the Election Commission.

On the other hand, the journey of political finance mapped by Sridharan and Vaishnav as one from the ‘corrupt equilibrium’ which existed in India till the 1990, to what could possibly be an ‘inflection point’ in 2017 with the introduction of anonymous electoral bonds, shows a movement towards opacity rather than transparency, and the weakening of the ECI’s power of oversight. The conclusion of the volume by Kapur, Sridharan and Vaishnav identifies the various fronts on which reforms are required. It would be important to see how the ‘grand bargain’ that the authors propose for a strict regulation of the electoral domain to curb the distortionary impact of money on Indian politics can actually materialize in a context where both crime and money have become indispensable parts of elections. Whether or not a political regime would have the courage to introduce reforms that may constrain its own political fortunes, is a question which may ultimately be addressed and resolved through the democratic process itself.