Politics and Money

Use the word “money” in the same sentence as “politics” and the next words that leap to our mind are “corruption” and “bribes”. While that association is indeed true, the reality is far more complicated and strewn with the misfiring of good intentions, says Rwitwika Bhattacharya-Agarwal in What Makes a Politician.

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Everyone needs money to live

 

She starts with the basic point – everyone needs money. Obviously. But how does one make money in politics? Political parties don’t pay salaries; and politics is a full-time job… you see the structural problem with such a setup?

 

Note that this problem isn’t limited to MLA’s and MP’s alone – it applies for the party workers as well. This leads to two common outcomes – many people avoid politics altogether; and the other set have to find ways within the context of politics and influence. With that in mind, consider a party worker who doesn’t get to contest the election but gets to be, say, the secretary to the elected representative. He is almost “forced” to seek money for giving access to the representative – after all, he and his family can’t be expected to starve, can they?

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Assumptions and errors at Independence

 

The Gandhian ideal that leaders be “selfless” has hurt the country. It eliminates contenders from the various professions – engineers, doctors, pretty much anyone who makes decent to good money but would still like to be involved in governance. Are the best doctors, lawyers, engineers the ones who are paid the least? And yet we insist that a lack of interest in money somehow makes for a better politician or ruler? This mindset then translated into very low official salaries for elected politicians, compared to many other countries.

“Expectations that anyone would work a sixteen-hour day on a low salary is unrealistic. However, we continue to maintain the expectation of a selfless political leader.”

 

At the time of independence, the view of the likes of Gandhi and Biswanath Das (who came from a huge land-owning family and had inherited huge wealth) that “public service should have nothing to do with money” won. Thus, very low salaries were assigned for the elected representatives. Over time, the idea that poor politicians were more representative of the public caught on, and the idea of a meritocratic politician got lost. In turn, that meant that the middle-class stopped being a source of politicians because, hey, they weren’t poor – a fatal “flaw” in the candidate.

“How do we expect ethical and corruption-free politicians to emerge from a system that does not talk explicitly about money as an issue for aspiring politicians?”

 

Today, only those who run businesses or whose jobs can be continued even when elected (e.g. lawyers, doctors) have any chance of not compromising their pre-election income levels. Obviously, there is something very wrong with the way the system is structured.

 

Another mistake at the time of independence was the assumption that nobody would be a full-time politician, that if a person lost an election, they would go back to their jobs until the next election cycle. Things didn’t play out that way, and the system wasn’t designed for this possibility. Nor has it been changed as the flaws in the system became more and more evident.

 

At the time of independence, a sensible aim was to ensure anyone who could contest elections, not just those with money. Therefore, the limit on campaign expenditure was kept very low, the aim being to make it affordable to all. But it proved to be too unrealistic, esp. in a country where constituencies are huge. This means a candidate has to lie about his poll expenditure:

“Atal Bihari Vajpayee once said that most political careers often begin with a lie, as candidates always misreport spending to the EC (Election Commission).”

 

This isn’t a justification for the outsized corruption in the system today. Rather, her point is that the cause for it is more complex than just simple greed. The cause lies at the root level, and so just cursing the outcome without addressing and changing things at the foundational level won’t solve anything.