ED's revolutionary move !!!
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: May 16, 2024 -

SHOULD political parties in India be considered any differently from other profit-making corporate houses in the country or elsewhere?

This is a long-standing question that has come to the fore once again in the light of a recent submission made by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the Delhi High Court.

During the hearing of bail plea of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader and former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia; the ED, which is probing the money laundering angle of the now scrapped Delhi liquor policy scam that has so far seen three of the key leaders of the party including its national convenor and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal land in jail, told the high court that a supplementary chargesheet would be filed to name AAP as an accused in the alleged liquor scam of receiving kickbacks from liquor vendors in exchange for preferential treatment.

The fact that this submission has come just days after the Supreme Court of India granted interim bail to Arvind Kejriwal to enable him to campaign for the ongoing Lok Sabha election shows that the ED is more than determined to do everything possible in its power and go all out in establishing the money trail, which it has not been able to do so, thus, putting its own reputation in the line of fire.

However, in the process, the ED has fortunately or unfortunately reignited the debate over whether political parties in India should be considered any differently from other profit-making corporate houses.

For long, one popular trope among political commentators is that political parties are like business houses and their leaders like CEOs.

But this has always been pooh-pooped by politicians and their supporters, who contested that such simplistic analogy distorted the very foundation and idea of how political parties in India, which are governed by The Representation of the People Act, 1951, function and operate.

It is true that as per the provisions laid down in The Representation of the People Act, 1951; political parties in India are barred from taking part in any activity of a commercial nature to earn profit. But this does not mean that political parties do not have any income of their own at all.

The very same Act allowing the political parties to accept voluntary contributions from anyone including corporate houses and also own immovable properties or deposits for earning some extra income has put a big question mark on the functioning of the political parties, making them not so different from the operation of corporate houses.

How voluntary are these so-called 'voluntary contributions’ from individuals and corporate houses to the political parties in India has also become an issue of public debate today in the wake of the Supreme Court of India striking down the controversial Electoral Bond Scheme for funding political parties as ‘unconstitutional’ on February 15 last.

So, the decision of ED to file a supplementary chargesheet for naming AAP as an accused in the Delhi liquor policy scam is going to be nothing short of a revolutionary move not only in terms of dragging a political party to the court for the first time in the history of democratic India, but also in the effort of reforming the entire political set-up by making the political parties accountable for the misconducts of their corrupt leaders.

Having said that, there is still one more question that the country’s premier agency tasked with tackling financial corruption could do the favour of answering.

As Aurobindo Pharma, one of whose directors was arrested in the Delhi liquor scam, is now confirmed to have bought electoral bonds worth Rs 52 crore with more than half of it going to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is there any chance of ED naming the ruling political party in any of its chargesheets in future?

If so, it would be truly revolutionary in every sense of the word.