 elections. We began in May 2021, but at that time we focused mostly on blockchains. Now we have broadened our scope considerably. One vote is hosted at Hasgeek, which is a platform for collaborations across practices surrounding technology, design, law, systems, data, privacy other topics. These sessions are designed to enable participants to acquire the foundational knowledge and perspectives required to evaluate the intended and unintended consequences of technology. This series is being done in collaboration with the Jindal School of Journalism. And for the audience, if you wish to speak, please use the raise hand function and you will be called upon. Or you can put your questions in the chat box on Zoom. Or if you're joining us from YouTube, please put your chats there and we will be monitoring that. We welcome Nitin Saithi and Jagdeep Chokar. And now I will hand this over to Professor Baracharji. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Fight for Democracy. It's a series during the ongoing elections in India to focus and discuss on some critical aspects of electionry and the previous episodes that we've done out here on one vote hosted at Hasgeek in collaboration with Jindal School of Journalism and Communication at Hopi Jindal Global University for Criminality and Politics and Data. And today we are going to discuss electoral bonds, transparency. Worlds that have entered are lexicon, but a lot of people are still not very clear of what it really means. What are electoral bonds? Why is electoral bonds controversial? Now, these are the questions that will be answered. Joining me is Nitin Saithi, a journalist and he's a member of the reporter's collective. The collective reports and investigates the functioning of Indian political economy and the electoral bonds investigation was one such. The collective reports in multiple languages, which is very important and very encouraging and formats, crowds, collaborations across platforms and sectoral expertise. He was also a partner at Land Conflict Watch, which is India's largest database research outfit comprising of lawyers, researchers and journalists who systematically document land and resort conflicts in India. And I have known Nitin for a very long time and you know, anything to do with environment reporting. Nitin was one of the most credible voices, investigative reporting, and he's been there around for a fairly long time. Jagdeep Choker, a professor, teacher, trainer, researcher, advisor of management and organizational behavior at the IIM Ahmedabad from 1985 to 2006 till the time he retired. And he's also citizen activist for improving democracy and governance in the country, a bird watcher and a conservationist, which probably brings him close, has some commonality with Nitin out here as well. Nitin is also a keen photographer and in many ways a conservationist in his conservation activism. And Dr. Choker is also a trained lawyer before becoming a professor. He was an engineer, manager with the Indian Railways and worked as an international marketing manager for four years. But he is here today because he's also the founding member of the Association of Democratic Reforms, ADR, an organization that now is very well known across the country for improving or for encouraging or investigating, for promoting transparency in elections. Welcome, Nitin and Dr. Choker. You know, anything in India is really big. Like the big fat Indian wedding, we also have the big expensive Indian elections. 2014, we were told was the most expensive election ever in India. And then 2019 came and 2014 seemed like nothing. I mean, I don't know what the exact amount would be. There were extrapolated figures, which I wouldn't like to mention out here because we will never know for certain what it would be. But it's a whopping amount of money that was spent in Indian elections. Now, where does this money come from? How do political parties raise funding? Now, in 2017, I think in the finance bill, something was introduced that was called electoral bonds. And in 2019, it got notified. And then we had the 2019 elections. Now, if I may request Nitin, who has investigated on electoral bonds to lay out this terrain as it were, Nitin, to explain what is this bond about? Why is it so controversial? Why is it called scam within courts? Sure. Thanks, Krishna and Shant for having me here today. Going by a queue, I'll try and introduce the basic logic of what electoral bonds is and perhaps towards the end, suggest why it's raised such a stink about how it functions. The then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley introduced the idea and the notion of electoral bonds under the Finance Act. His claim at that time and the government's claim at that time was that this was being done to bring transparency to how political parties get funded in India. To one part, he was right at that time that electoral funding in India for many years and decades has been a dark hole. A lot of cash moved around in elections. And as Krishna rightly said, it's very difficult to pin down and say how much gets spent because a lot of money gets spent off the balance sheet, as they say. Mr. Jaitley and the BJP government and the Modi Prime Minister introduced the idea saying this would bring transparency because money would move through bank accounts into political parties. It was quite clear to most people I think who understood electoral funding from day one that in the name of transparency, what was being introduced was perhaps a very dangerous instrument that could allow unaccounted for money to move from unknown people into political parties, coffers without us as citizens knowing who's giving and donating how much to the political parties. The government also introduced other amendments to the laws which did two really dangerous things. One, it allowed indirectly foreign entities, people sitting outside and companies sitting outside the boundaries of India to also donate through their subsidiaries to Indian political parties, something which had been banned till now and for good reasons as we all understand. They brought about another amendment which allowed shell companies, companies that exist on registers, on government registers but who do nothing, who earn not a penny if they don't want. The government allowed these companies to also provide anonymously and secretly infinite amount of money to political parties, which meant you could float a company whose real ownership is unknown to all of us, a company that produces nothing earns zero but yet is able to donate hundreds of crores secretively to political parties. This is standard route that otherwise is known as the Havala Racket or the Black Money Scamming Roots, which the same government has claimed it would try to stop when it came into power in 2014. Put together, this scheme to my mind did one thing, it did create a channel through banking accounts to transfer money to political parties but it also used the confusion in the minds that was used in the demonetization era to make people unclear about what is Black Money as we call it in India, in US it's called Dark Money. Black Money is not money which is given in cash to each other, it's money which is unaccounted for or untaxed and people cannot make out where it's coming from, how it's been earned and whether who really owns that money. I apologize for some background noise, I'm living in a joint family and we'll have to suffer some of my cousins and the chicken once in a while. So the government did use bank accounts and mandated that the money should move through bank accounts but it passed amendments to different laws which made sure none of us as citizens will ever come to know who's donated the amount to which political party. I could literally go to a bank, in this case the state bank of India, buy out what would be in other terms a bearer check in some ways where I don't have to say who I'm going to give this money to, I'll take it as an IOU or a certificate or a promissory note as it's called in economics and hand it over to X person, X could hand it over to Y and Y could eventually hand it over to a political party. By the end of it, there would be no way of tracing who actually bought it and who actually got it. The political parties were mandated under the amendment amended laws not to report where they had got the bonds from, only to say how much aggregate bond amount they've got in a particular annual financial year. The corporates were not required now to also report who they had funded. They were technically expected to in their annual reports present that they have spent some money on political funding but considering the lakhs and lakhs of companies in India, no one would ever be able to dig out which shell company in which part of India was used to divert funds to political parties. This was the crux as it started off. We at the Reporters Collective through RTI along with Commodore Lokesh Patra brought out documents, government documents through RTI which showed that the scheme had been floated by the government despite vehement opposition by the Reserve Bank of India which very categorically said that this would bring in black money into Indian politics. It would be unaccountable for, it went ahead to say it would bring foreign influence into politics as well as create a separate form of currency in some sense which could destabilize Indian economy if it grew and bloated as it has been bloating ever since it was floated. The Election Commission which is the statutory and the constitutional authority to regulate elections and electoral spending said exactly the same and said it twice over, they were overruled. The government on its records created a pretense as if they had consulted others and experts but as we found out through these documents and reported over 10 parts, the government had actually gone aside and created a mythology that they had consulted both political parties and these constitutional authorities and the Reserve Bank of India to have what they claim to be a transparent system. As the results came out, we know of at least the first round and we know by logic of most rounds by which these electoral bonds have gone to political parties that a large amount of this money does go to the party in power and the logic is rather simple. The only entity which is able to monitor who's collecting the money and where it's going is the government itself because it oversees this operation in the State Bank of India and it has kept an audit trail to know who donates and to which party. Clearly the fear itself of a government in power punishing somebody for not or for giving money to opposition parties has ensured that a large percentage and then I say large I mean upwards of 90% goes to party in power in this case the BJP. I'll stop here because I think at the moment just exploring what this electoral bonds is for colleagues who are here and did not know the more internal basics of it and if Kishle later points out you come back to critique of what it really means for democratic processes as well as electoral funding in India. Thanks Nithin. Yeah, this is like a primer in electoral bonds but if I can bring in Dr Choker now and the obvious question Dr Choker is that you know elections were fought before 2018 and elections will be fought in future. Elections have always been fought with money which has not been transparent at any point of time. There were allegations I remember in the late 90s and 2000s that the amount that whichever the party was in power months before a year before elections would ensure that the development funds were released and part of the development fund would be siphoned back but these are all allegations never really corroborated but you know it was like in India like in India we know a lot of things which we don't corroborate but we almost believe that with certainty I think most voters in India have a sense of you know complacency about the fact that you know the political parties are well funded they are corrupt etc etc. Now when you started ADR and you know it's been it's been very bipartisan and it's been following a certain pattern that you kind of set for ADR is and when the electoral bonds came what were the challenges that you that you met in trying to promote transparency trying to investigate transparency. Thank you Mr. Bhartajaji. I will perhaps confine myself to electoral bonds and leave off the other challenges that ADR faced over the last 23 years. The budget speech of the finance minister late Mr. Roondi Hadley was on the 1st of February 2017. Now in that budget speech there was a separate section consisting of two paragraphs which was titled transparency in electoral funding. First of all anybody who who saw the title or heard the title was very pleased that there going to be transparency in electoral funding or political funding and my good friend Dr. Kureshi who was the chief election commissioner earlier always makes a point of saying that when he heard the finance minister say that for the last 70 years we have not been able to find a way to make a political and electoral funding transparent he said this was like music to my ears it was a little dramatic. But the first paragraph said what has been wrong and why nothing has been possible and the second paragraph said what is going to be done and what was going to be done was that a new instrument called electoral bond will be introduced it will be sold only by the state bank of India and it will be given to political parties who will have to deposit it in a pre-designated account and it has to be done within 15 days and so on and so forth and this will ensure transparency as Mr. Nitin said he said it will go through banking channels so so far so good now there is a tradition or there was a tradition that in the morning the finance minister will present the budget in the parliament and in the afternoon he or she would hold a informal briefing session with the media. Now in that media session at about 3.30 in the afternoon Mr. Jaitley said a few things about electoral bonds and when people asked him a little more he actually uttered this sentence he said the bonds will be in the nature of bearer bonds the identity of the donor will be anonymous so it was when I read this in the morning the next day on the 2nd of February in the papers that this is what he said from that day I have been on a quest to find out a dictionary which tells me that transparency and anonymity are synonymous because as far as I understand anything which is anonymous is not transparent and anything which is transparent is not anonymous but we had this I mean I shouldn't be saying so he's no more God rest the soul and peace he was a very bright person but he he had this and he was also a very very good lawyer so he was able to say this that anonymity of the donor will be assured but transparency will also be ensured anyway once the the budget documents came through and one read through them it was discovered that you know there were going to be changes to four laws the Reserve Bank of India Act the Income Tax Act the Companies Act and the Representation of People Act now each of these amendments were very very significant and when one read into the fine print I mean let me give you a couple of examples the Companies Act had a provision that any company only a company which has made profits over the last three years can donate not more than 7.5 percent of its profits to political parties in one year not more than 7.5 percent one change in the company law remove this limit of 7.5 percent which meant that now there was no limit and that is why Nitin said that a company could donate any amount of money without even making a penny of profit number one the second amendment in the Companies Act was that any company donating to a political party had to declare the name of the political party and the amount donated this requirement was also completely removed now such on the face of it it is a line the you know section 1.24 of the Companies Act should read as follows or this portion is replaced by this but when you look into the details this is kind of thing you find now the amendment of the Result Bank of India Act and the representation of People Act were similar as Nitin said in in not in some detail the Result Bank of India is the only institution authorized to issue exchangeable instruments like currency notes that you can give it to A to B and there is no record there is no identification any other instrument has some record so the Result Bank of India said that these bonds will become like currency and therefore they will lead to generation of black money infusion of shady capital creation of shell companies and so on similarly the the election commission of India said that this will make funding even more opaque and therefore it will make the already uneven playing field even more uneven now Result Bank of India and election commission of India are not to be taken lightly they are constitutional authorities they exist and because they figure in the constitution and they are supposed to be theoretically under the constitution independent of the government and the noting on the fires that Commodore Matra got access to through RTI and with Nitin and his colleagues reported very well show that the finance secretary writes on the file that I have explained this to the governor and deputy governor of the RBI and they had not understood the scheme earlier now they have understood and the election commissioners also were kind of confused and I clarified which I mean these are amazing things that happened the most the as one of the most fundamental system that is wrong with the electoral bonds is that they are completely unconstitutional because they were introduced as a part of the budget now a budget falls under the category of what is called a money bill in the constitution there is a definition of a money and which is that the money bill deals with any expenditure from the consolidated fund of India broadly speaking our consolidated fund fund of India is a fund by with the government of India from which all expenditure of the government is done in the case of electoral bond the state bank of India says the bond to XYZ a person or a company or whoever there is no consolidated fund of India the buyer of the bond pays money and the SBI gives her or him a piece of paper then this person goes and gives this piece of paper to XYZ and it finally lands up in the bank of a political in the bank account of a political party there is no connection whatsoever with the consolidated fund of India therefore electoral bond do not or cannot fall under the definition of a money bill so putting them in the money bill was for a reason the government of the day had a majority in the Lok Sabha but they did not have a majority in the Rajasabha no no no ha they did not have a majority in the Rajasabha but still a money bill has to be passed in the Lok Sabha like any other bill then it is sent to the Rajasabha whereas Rajasabha can make amendments etc to the to any other bill but a money bill can be only discussed by the Rajasabha they can they can make observations they cannot withhold its passage therefore the to avoid the problem or avoid problems in the Rajasabha they put it in the money bill that even if people object it will still pass so it is unconstitutional it goes against all tenets of transparency that the supreme court has been saying about elections and about there being a level playing field and as Nitin explained it happened on the very in the very first week that it was discovered that if only the State Bank of India knows who is buying electoral bonds and nobody else knows and the scheme says that the State Bank of India not tell anybody unless somebody comes with a court order in a criminal case now if and that the State Bank of India will collect KYC know your customer details if the State Bank of India is not to share this with anybody then why collect it but what we know is that State Bank of India cannot hide any information from the finance ministry and once the finance ministry knows that somebody is buying these bonds it is very simple and lightheartedly I say that you know the State Bank of India main branch in the parliament speak somebody buys electoral bonds for two crores and gets into a car and starts driving towards towards Akbar Road and those who are familiar with Delhi will know that Akbar Road has the quarters of the congress party and from parliament street as you are going towards Akbar Road you pass through two or three roundabouts and on one of those roundabouts you get a phone call how are you doing professor Kishle Bhattajarji how I'm doing well and the person says I am so and so if I were a professor Bhattajarji's place I will start sweating right there and if I am not and still more robust I will easily say I'm doing all right to this person says oh I believe you have bought electoral bond got two crores and brother Bhattajarji says yes then he says so which party are you thinking of giving it that is enough and the person will turn his car towards the sugar which is the headquarters of the BJP so the bonds given the structure have I think Dr Choker you've muted yourself by mistake the electoral bonds through this process had the potential of choking the funding to all opposition parties except the ruling party and this would happen regardless of which the ruling parties and this is the carrot which was hung before opposition parties none of the opposition parties opposed it tooth and nail they were very mild opposition noises in the parliament but finally after we had filed after ADR and file the petition in the Supreme Court one of the political parties has also filed a petition I must say that but most political parties faced just to be a little irreverent there was a film which said apra number aya they thought that when they are in political power somewhere in some state they will also reap this harvest of electoral funds so it was a very insidious scheme and then once the scheme came into place strange things happened the scheme said it is only for Lok Sabha elections after the introduction the election to after the Lok Sabha election in 2019 came the Karnataka election and all of a sudden an order was issued to make an exception this one time and open a window for the Karnataka election now that one time exception has now become the room in every state assembly election electoral funds are sold which is against the scheme as it was formulated by the government itself so you know you are violating rules you make yourself when the suit you there is no accountability whatsoever and we can see that one political parties seems to have got almost all the money available and in the ADR also puts out things about you know the donation political parties thought and saw their assets and their wealth this time it was interesting that the party with the highest wealth was BJP and the party at number two was not the Congress it was BSP so the financial stature of parties is undergoing a significant change and all this is happening under the invisible hand of the ruling party and as has been said in the partitions in the court and elsewhere this is a absolute confirmed recipe for Indian politics and Indian democracy to be controlled by money whether Indian money or foreign money whether legitimate money or drug money or anything else so this is as I said in some other discussion that it will not be a low tantra it will be a Dhan tantra so if our democracy gets to be controlled by money which comes from anywhere then we can imagine what is going to happen this has implications for national security it has implications of for all kinds of things and therefore to my mind this is a very very serious danger to democracy in a very fundamental way and the supreme court of India we filed this petition in 2017 the first substantial hearing was held in 2019 April 12 and the three judge bench headed by the Chief Justice of that time actually wrote in their honor that the pleadings raised by both sides have weighty raised weighty issues which which impact the entire electoral and political system now weighty issues are waiting and it has now been five years nothing has happened elections have come and elections have gone electoral bonds are being sold and something like 7 to 20 percent go to the ruling party and this is what we think is a democracy in the which we are living electoral bonds are the most they are one of the most dangerous features that have been introduced for democracy and we must fight against it as best as we can otherwise we can start worshipping memon and that's it thank you doctor choker we'll obviously have to come back to you at this point i'm gonna ask the audience on our youtube live streaming to please type your questions and the others who are out here on the zoom platform also to have your questions ready nithin doctor choker has laid out the the pitfalls of what electoral bonds would be but if you can also add that what are the consequences of this black slash dark money i mean we know that through rti applications that roughly around 10 000 crores of bonds probably were purchased since 2018 correctly if i'm wrong uh but i don't think so we know who uh contributed that there was also a report that you know there's that each bond has a almost invisible alpha numeric invisible code uh what does that code actually do i mean and why is that every bond has a different code if that is a safety code which the government claims to be but also if you can tell us uh the consequences doctor choker mentions drug funding i was thinking of the terror funding because the terror funding is seems to be a very favorite uh term for the for many governments because they can uh run after politicians uh or of or civilians or any any citizens of this country uh alleging or uh charging them of uh being involved in terror funding but this seems to be a more fit case for such opaque funding right yes uh so let me start by giving an analogy instead and a principle of what electoral politics ought to be like in a democracy the basic notion of electoral politics and democracy is that we as citizens elect people uh to not govern us but to run the society on our behalf they're supposed to be our public servants the logic is that they should therefore only be answerable to us citizens who vote therefore it's not companies or NGOs or trust that vote but only citizens who vote but what happens in case you and I and everyone here puts one vote each out of however 70 million except the votes we have but instead of company or an individual comes and behind closed doors hands over a thousand corrodes to a political party and says hey here's my donation that seems nice I mean maybe the part company or entity we don't know of wants to really support democracy in somewhere and believes in the ideology of a party fairly so it's quite possible but I come to think of it either you or I who earn whatever amount we earn if you're going to put a third of our income or even a tenth of our income and give it to somebody a political party logically we would expect it to deliver something against that amount there's no other reason a company is supposed to make profits so if it's donating some amount to a political party clearly intends to reap some profits out of it the profit would clearly come in terms of if elected that politician rendering certain policies in favor of a corporate entity changing rules and laws that govern businesses industries it takes simple tweaks to say certain goods will get less tax certain goods which are imported which compete with my goods will get more taxed it can this infinite play available for a government to favor different corporates and their business interests and clearly if I'm going to invest a thousand crores in a political party I would like to reap at least 5000 crores in the next five years out of it because for me it's a political and business investment I'm making in the political party and the government who has taken this money would have to tweak the laws rules regulations and business channels to make sure that that benefit is returned to that entity clearly that party is then not functioning for its citizens interest it is functioning for interests of one or two entities or more entities that secretly provide them funds then classical corruption this is what's called chronic capitalism right that you quietly change rules you don't break rules but you change the rules and you change the laws to quietly favor somebody who's given you done you some favor now what electoral bonds does is turn chronic capitalism legal in India because now it's under the law that you can secretly provide funds to a political party and you we will never come to know as citizens who funded these political parties for what benefits that they got eventually we've seen enough I mean I and my team at reporters collective as investigative journalists keep digging out these little scams big scams of what 6400 crores 10,000 crores and you've seen this in all governments these are mainly symptoms of what is chronic capitalism you're able to catch the fever the essence of this disease is this black opaque electoral funding which used to exist earlier as you and professor Joker both pointed out correctly but at least on paper by law it was illegal till then now you've sanctified it by law and said this is how our electoral politics will run legally foreign entities foreign companies having clearly some business in India will be able to pay political parties without us as citizens knowing where that money came from this is second degree challenge that this provides to the nature of particularly I feel Indian politics one of the uniqueness of Indian electoral politics has been the emergence of very diverse voices of communities that were historically disenfranchised or discriminated against and those communities being able to come forth into politics by creating new small formations and change the nature of our democracy make it relatively better what electoral funding does of this kind is deny them that equitous right to also collect funds but clearly as Dr Joker was saying the largest party in power will always attract like a magnet most of this money and you will deny it to new emerging parties which otherwise have a very small base but had it been a transparent process they would have possibly got more so it also over time debilitates for our democracy the basic fundamental requirement that we provide equitous space in a political space to smaller emerging political parties from different corners imagine a small Dalit party emerging say in Bihar or UP or Tamil Nadu very wherever else a unit which is led by Dalit leaders wanting to collect funds it's near impossible for them now to collect funds from this route because here you have a political party in power which will make sure it doesn't which brings me to the point you question you asked about the secret number on the so-called electoral bond with my friend and colleague poonam discovered and reported on at quint at that time she now works with us that number is basically the government's way of tracking who is buying the bond and which party is getting the bond and it's fairly logical if you have a check I'm sure you know these days we wire transfer money but those of us who remember checks every check had a unique identity number because fairly it is a bank which is dealing with these amounts we'll have to say on my record who put the money there and where did the money go it will have to have a bank trail of audit trail of where the money goes that number was put on the electoral bonds to ensure the state bank of India can then trace where the money comes from and where it goes records that commander location pattern we brought out clearly showed there was a great deliberation in the government before the electoral bonds were floated to say yes we do need this special feature the sbi insisted without this it cannot function the rbi had completely opposed it the government bypassed the rbi by setting up the sbi to do its dirty work clearly because the sbi as we know anyone who's covered the finance ministry and finances of indian banking system the sbi is a government bank everyone in that bank is selected and positioned by the government it responds to the government's instructions on various schemes and how it transits finances unfortunately even at times of who it gives loans to the record show as dr choker was talking on that incident where these immoral laws or rules if i may call them said that electoral bond should only be floated just before general elections for look saba it was the prime minister's office which sent instructions to break that rule that it had passed and allow electoral bonds to be marketed out sold and purchased during general state elections like kanataka and others it was the finance ministry which instructed the state bank again the same document show which said oh these boy bonds are about to expire please use them in this in that fashion we've seen correspondence where the state bank of india was on the most on a daily basis corresponding with the finance ministry telling them what's happening with the electoral bond scheme it's the most insidious idea the fact that i think sometimes i wonder whether we failed as journalists uh to talk about it in a better fashion you're setting the fundamentals of democracy yet as dr choker said at great risk you're setting up a mechanism that any political party in power will have no incentive to change once you've set us rolling down this hill there has been as i keep saying it's never been that indian electoral politics and electoral funding has been clean but at least till this happened we had a veneer that it was illegal there was hope that you could move up the ladder and bring better reforms that would make it better we've set ourselves decades back i think we've set ourselves back to their era where you know you would have a king who would take favors and then do things that needed to be done to deliver we moved far away from the nature of democracy we needed to move towards it's so unique that no other known democracy in in the world follows this pattern we are uniquely corrupt and legally corrupt now in how electoral funding is practiced and its consequences are seen in our daily lives it's not an um i would think it's not an abstract idea it's not a distant idea from us as citizens this is when governments come elected in this manner that they will render things which are not in our favor which were not meant for average citizens benefits thousands of crores worth of benefits would be provided to small corporates unknown corporates as profits at the cost of us as citizens and taxpayers and everyone pays taxes not just the middle class remember indirect taxes are paid disproportionately more by the poor than the rich our money is being diverted into the hands of corporates as profits as a return on this investment that they corporates make from inside and outside india as electoral bonds and they can be nothing more insidious than that and as an investigative journalist sometimes you feel you think your entire business of investigative journalism is silly because all we're going to keep catching for the rest of our lives most often are these cases of corruption which is simply a symptom of how bad electoral funding is and it's inevitable end of this kind of electoral funding you know i have absolutely no doubt in my mind that as journalist as you mentioned that we have not done what we could have done should have done we should have done better but brings this raises this question in my mind that is the voter really concerned about where the political party is getting its money from and i use an analogy out here is that you know having worked in a network for 20 years raising questions to politicians and to various other investigating stories you have been there as well with legacy media i i wasn't really bothered about who was sponsoring us still a very very much much later did we ask these questions you know that why is Vedanta suddenly sponsoring a series on the girl child or why is Dettol sponsoring a series on Swachh Bharat so is the voter really concerned i mean one hand transparency should be there and you know democracy should have transparency but i'm just asking is that is that something that you you encountered i have no doubt kishle i know most journalists become skeptics as they go kree i've become more optimist i actually believe citizens are really bothered about it that they don't have a handle on it and they're not able to grapple with it is fair because they spend a much of their lives just earning the basic livelihoods considering how poor a large percentage of india is but therefore they put people like you and me in these positions to help ask these questions in the correct time in the correct way and the loudest possible way in all my two decades of journalism i never felt that any citizen was not aware that there is great corruption in how a quality electoral funding works all of us have been aware of the nature of this game and it is really based on how large institutions in india respond statutory institutions constitutional and institutions respond to what i really like to believe is now a perpetual crisis in electoral funding in india if the supreme court of india can fail us as dr choker was saying and i use the mildest possible term when i say this i would like to use stronger terms if it completely fails after acknowledging that this is a problem that a crisis has been created what does an average citizen do where does he go or she go and ask for changes that are to be brought when the election commission sits back after raising first flanks of when the reserve bank quietens down after the first raising some issues red flags with the concern if all institutions that are supposed to protect the nature of our democracy and the practice of our democracy fail the citizens i don't think i want to blame the citizens for not having thought through i think they're very well aware and therefore you see an anger amongst them you see a degree of skepticism and cynicism against them it's not that they're not bothered about it why would either one of us not be bothered that our elected mls our grand panjad leaders and our mps are not more responsive to us clearly we would want them to be but we've set them in a set game where they have little options because i think a lot of us in positions of public space where we could have changed these things have failed them we have failed us it doesn't i don't think they've failed in questioning how our democracies function thanks dr choker we've already got questions and since we are getting close to our given time let me pose this question to you uh from the audience that now that electoral bonds are weaponized what is the future how can there be dissent i i suppose how can there be reform i mean you know i mean i need to continue when nathan left and i'll come back to this how can we correct this uh the question was of choice do voters care where political parties get their money from and mind you this is wonderful that this is exactly the expression the learned attorney general of india said in the supreme court hearing he said why do voters want to know where do political parties get their money from they should only worry about where do candidates get their money from and there was a kind of a sigh in the supreme court as to what are the gentlemen saying now let me give you on an example uh uh nathan said that the we supposedly vote the government vote for the government or we elect the government do we really elect the government and i would ask uh if it were a more interactive session i would ask whom do we elect when we go to vote and to since we are running short of time i will say we elect or we don't even elect we give one vote to one individual out of six seven eight ten where do those six seven eight ten come from and they come because they have been chosen by political parties so i as a voter have no choice but to vote for one of the x number of people chosen by x number of political parties one can say there are independent candidates yes there are but the the interesting fact is that the number of independent getting uh uh number of independent candidates contesting the election has been going up and the number of independent candidates getting elected has been going out in the current loksava there were three or four independent members independent just can't win because they don't have the money to win so since all candidates effectively are chosen by political parties my first proposition is that a voter's choice is is preconstrained by the choices made by a set of political parties the voter and our choice is her or his choice is preconstrained by political party then anyway somebody votes and somebody gets elected the person who is so called an elected representative does that person have a choice how to vote for a bill or against a bill in the parliament or in the state assembly the anti-reflection law forces a person to vote according to his party's wishes otherwise her or his membership can be terminated proposition two the choice of a so-called elected representative is completely controlled by the political party and if you put propositions one and two together the answer is the government is formed by political parties period let us say somebody gets elected as an MLA or NMP you know just before the election she or he might come to your house and say please vote for me the day after getting elected try and meeting your MP or MLA you can't because the allegiance of a elected representative does not lie with the voter it lies with the person who gave her or him the ticket because had the ticket not been given nobody could have voted for that so it is the ticket giver who is the controller of our elected representative and who are the ticket givers somewhere it is a high command somewhere it is a coterie somewhere it is a subribo so the basic problem is that none of our political parties is a democratically functioning entity on the top we have a vibrant democracy we all you know i've lost all my hair saying vibrant democracy but the political parties which supposedly run this democracy are completely a non-democratic and therefore they need such ways of collecting money because if they were democratic they would not need to hide where do they get their money from because money is not the money that comes into a political party does not belong to the party it belongs to a coterie in the party and therefore the question was what oh sorry i got distracted sorry sorry political parties control everything and in every constituency there are only two or three candidates who are really possibly going to get elected and if these two or three also have criminal cases pending against them whom does a voter vote for the voter has no choice while voting the voter has no choice water doesn't even know who gets what money water feels that if i can get two or three thousand during the time of election let me get that there is a Hindi saying which is i mean there is complete loot of public money of my money and nithin said this is our taxes our parades don't give their money all the cooperates are existing on public money so voters do do voters do not have a choice they are concerned but they are completely helpless so thanks dr choker i mean uh yeah it just reminds me how um the government went to town asking for uh demanding to know who was sponsoring the farmers protest near my place out here that's that's the joke when you when you look at the kind of funding that goes into running an elections and you know which is just to give the audience a sense of what we are talking about you know i mean there is no way i can corroborate it but it it was more than 50 000 crore let's say you know the large elections that was a kind of money that we are talking about so we are not talking about even a money that we can we can write it down i don't know how many zeros comes to 20 probably we'll have to wrap up here can i can i add a bit to what you just said yes the amount of money in 2009 Lok Sabha election there were 6753 candidates we decided to analyze the election expenditure affidavits of these candidates 6500 no 753 four candidates said that they had spent about uh no more than the limit which was about 16 or 25 lakhs 30 candidates said they had spent about 90 to 95 percent of the money so 6753 minus 34 is 6719 which is 99.99999 from Delhi to in fall those people said that they spent only 45 percent to 55 percent of the limit achieve election commissioner who are retired by then he said if this is the case we should be reducing the limit and not increase the limit and at every election there is a clamor to increase the limit and it does not stop here in the same 2009 election a gentleman i had to say there's a person who was elected unfortunately he's also no more became a minister in a public meeting in Bombay he said he had spent eight crores on his election his affidavits said 19.9 crores 19.9 lakhs so contrast this to the 50,000 figure or 30,000 or 60,000 with the center of a media study is estimated i mean with all regard to doctor in Bhaskar now there is no basis for that we just don't know how much money gets spent because i would imagine 90 percent of the money gets spent on the county and none less than little biari by pay is on the court having said that every parliamentarian begins his parliamentary career with a lie on election expenditure so nobody can corroborate don't worry about it thanks Dr Chokar yes you know for a long time in India's northeast every government would use the cliche that insurgency is a cottage industry now you know politics in that comparison is a large scale you know it's not a cottage industry it's a heavy industry heavy industry so mithin the question posed out here is then why hasn't traditional media i suppose what they mean as mainstream within air courts or legacy media why hasn't that media explored the consequences of electoral bonds i forget about consequences i think they haven't even talked about electoral bonds even i belong to that media or belong to that media mithin but it's it's simple one line answer they don't have the spine to the fact that they are also reliant on advertisements from same corporates post-liberalization that's been growing a large amount of funding for legacy media organizations of all kinds they just do not have the mandate to do it because they're answerable more to their advertiser than to the readers and i think the emergence of independent media which relies say like the reporters collective on citizens who can afford to to donate to make sure reportage and people like us are answerable only to them it's a fair ask and i think that little has moved in that direction i don't they're pretty solid young organizations now in india which are trying to do it in a very difficult atmosphere i think it needs to grow i think 90s was another era we are now in an era where large philanthropies rich and middle class individuals in india and i do mean middle class is a different genre than what most indians trust and believe themselves to not to be part of they do need to pay for journalism to be answerable to them just as we want to make sure that our electoral elected leaders are answerable to us as citizens i i will not paint a rosy i rosy tainted image of journalism was 30 40 years ago and it was spectacular and suddenly that golden era has gone i think it was always facing this challenges but post-demolization facing the brand of corporate power and corporate funding and the changing nature of business of journalism it's got a little worse in the last few years it's got far worse it's become extremely difficult to do this kind of investigative work with persistence and consistency both one of its possible you can do one of these and go off into you know oblivion claiming you did one good story in life right but for organizations and individuals to persistently do this kind of work to not let go as you say all good journalism is being like a dog with a bone pursuing it endlessly that can only be possible if citizens very fund reportage not opinion not curation not instant remix of existing information but pure reportage in its sense i i mean while i've had the great benefit of claiming very often like on this forum that i was one who was able to bring out large elements of what happened in the electoral bonds scheme if you look back actually it was Commodore Lockeesh Bhattra who put most effort it was just an individual citizen free of all encumbrances of you know surviving in a bad newsroom who brought it out i was just fortunate at that time to be in an independent space in the reporters collective to be able to publish it with an independent organization that was fearless about business interests in India and was able to put it out in multiple languages we found partners to do this across the board but if we want to see this kind of a grow and it should grow because again unsubility doesn't end at just getting votes and putting votes for candidates is to hold them accountable to us for what they do and don't do we do need to build an ecosystem for journalism in India and reportage i keep insisting reportage and not just opinion writing where we are held completely accountable to citizens but we're also funded by citizens to do this work else we are just another business and journalism can't work as just another business totally agree i think Sainath had once was speaking to our students and you know he requested them that if they could go and buy mug of coffee for x amount of rupees i'm sure that you know they could go and do the same to buy some news i mean we expect news coming to a free of cost to our rooms i mean we i mean somehow i think we're still not used to the idea of paying i mean the paywall still hasn't been successfully been exploited the subscription model doesn't work very well because we have almost an entitlement that okay news should be free coming to us without any payment and yet we demand quality and i think this message should go out to the audience with a request that please you know unless you pay you cannot or contribute you cannot demand quality news which is not misinformation or disinformation i mean if i may add kishle an overused an aji perhaps but if you're gonna pay peanuts you gotta get monkeys doing your journalism for you can i yes yes i'm journalist can i button to this yes damit chowka please cozy conversation you know my first question that i've been wanting to ask from the time kishle asked you that question is isn't the entire traditional or legacy media owned by big business so how can we expect them to do anything else and you're right nithin journalism cannot run as any other business and let me then submit that there are a few human endeavors that cannot run as normal businesses and before journalism come health and education absolutely you cannot run these things as a business including journalism i mean they have a special place imagine if there was no news at all in the world would we know what is happening in ukraine today would we know which political leader is violating the modern code of conduct in which state today so if we realize that education health and media and news are things which we cannot do without and no human being can do without it therefore they cannot be businesses because the definition of a business as nithin said earlier is to make a profit these activities cannot run on making a profit and therefore we have to you know break people into learning to pay for news after all you know the all india radio used to be free except a radio license and newspapers have always been subsidized by advertisements but today advertisements have taken over we need to yes it's a long story yes thank you love the choker i think we are running right out of time you know for all intents and purposes electoral bonds failed to provide the voter with any meaningful information that aids are in making more informed voting choices it should be the in the fundamental you know platform on which democracy really rests that the seriously challenges the transparency made by policy but my takeaway line of course is from dr choker was saying about late mr jetley saying that how anonymity and transparency will be ensured i mean you know this is the poetry of irony and thank you so much everyone for joining thank you nithin thank you dr choker and as the just to borrow what nithin was saying i think at the right time or even not even if it's the wrong time but at all times i think we need to raise our voices and remind people inform people of what's happening and if people want they probably will be able to change is going to be inevitable but unless we identify the society's problems unless we amplify those problems there cannot be any action or any traction i'm happy to report dr choker that while the number of independent MPs is going down in the parliament the number of independent journalists is going up so yes on that note thank you so much good night remain thank you for having us here thank you