Demonetisation: Nailing The Netas

Election funding has been described as the fountain head of corruption in the country. Will pm modi’s demonetisation move root out this malaise? Or will it soon be business as usual?

- Kaushik Deka

When at 8 pm on November 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on national television that currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination would be invalid from midnight, in one fell swoop he dealt a crippling blow to what has been described as “the mother of all corruption in the country”—election funding. “Elections have become the fountainhead of corruption in the country. The voter does not realise that for every Rs 100 that comes, for example, from a candidate as a lure for votes, he or she is likely to end up paying 5-10 times more annually as bribes in availing basic public services that a citizen is entitled to from the government,” says a report by the Delhi based Centre for Media Studies (CMS).

By striking at the root of corruption, Modi hopes to kill two birds with one stone. In the short term, he aims to neutralise the play of black money in the five states—including the most politically significant, Uttar Pradesh—going to polls next year. But the long-term goal is to free Indian politics and governance itself from the vice-like grip of the politician businessman nexus. “India’s political finance reform has been stymied by two major factors: a lack of political will for reform, and an economy in which the state exerts a heavy hand, thus incentivising illicit funding,” says E. Sridharan, academic director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI) in Delhi.