Electoral Bonds and the Political Economy of Extortion
Sanjay Roy
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INDIA is one among her peers recording a very low tax-GDP ratio, and the effective tax rate for the corporates have been sometimes lower than the income tax rates applicable to middle class income slabs. This low tax regime is a key mandate of neoliberalism as it is committed to unshackle corporate capital from the marred regulations that are meant to mobilise resources for subsidising the poor. Hence tax should be kept low to ensure greatest freedom for capital! In order to ensure unbridled decisive execution of pro-corporate policies, the capitalist class of India could successfully manoeuvre public opinion a decade back securing mandate for a ‘decisive government’ and a ‘government with a difference’. Not only recreating distant past as ‘a revolt against future’, in view of realising the lost past being one of the major planks of authoritarian populism and fascism but the other common feature between the two is also to recreating the recent past to suit the emerging present. But the genie is now out of the box, the demagogue emerges to be the unchallenged face of nationalist chauvinism, acquired immense power within the party and now it is perhaps time to pay for that.
Neoliberalism faces an inherent contradiction which is the following. It is a regime which is committed to execute policies in favour of the rich but in democracy becoming rulers requires an enabling popular support. In other words, it has to mediate the difficult task of mobilising the oppressed and exploited mass in favour of the rich who are their expropriators! Several means are being adopted, different apparatus are deployed to champion the cause of the corporates, ironically, by gathering support from the toiling mass. The structural divides between classes are vitiated by creating enemies within by using religion, caste or race whatever suits the best and all these divisions are subsumed into a narrative of ‘we versus they’ – where the ‘they’ can be Pakistan sometime or China or the Muslim world some other time. Pulwama has done its job in the last election! No media dare to question the lie, because new lies are to be created and peddled perpetually, relentlessly, so as to create a continuous sequence of collective forgetting and collective confusion. But apart from all these, there is a process of economic management which faces its own contradiction and necessitates the imagination of a new instrument called ‘electoral bond’.
MANAGING DISCONTENT
Neoliberalism creates the market society to augment surplus appropriation. It is executed through worldwide repression of wages through intensifying exploitation and expropriation. Any obstacle to labour arbitrage and profiteering is dismantled through active State intervention so that the logic of market prevails in every aspect of life. It entails the process of redrawing the boundaries of capitalism by primary accumulation, loot and plunder resulting in massive dispossession of human beings and life threatening appropriation of nature. It also means enhanced commodification of every aspect of life and establishing private property upon community or publicly owned assets. These fresh releases of assets are combined into new instruments of speculation. All these boil down to repression of the working people who are the majority voters in a democracy.
The neoliberal state has to manage the political process of sustaining hegemony of the ruling class which increasingly becomes difficult in a democracy where the government has to be elected through popular mandate. The usual way is to transfer a part of the surplus to the dispossessed masses in the backdrop of severe contraction of universal rights. It is essentially a process of managing discontent through revolving micro welfare schemes which is subsumed into the grand denial of established welfare provisions and rights. Almost all the ruling parties at the centre and the states are offering various modes of cash transfer that offer some relief in the midst of massive contraction in real incomes of the working people experienced in the past three decades. This has led to an irreversible competition among political parties that undoubtedly precipitates into promises of higher dozes of relief to people and postpones or displaces the eruption of discontent on more structural issues of growing unemployment, inequality, uncertainty and dispossession. But getting an edge through such provisioning is increasingly becoming difficult for any particular political party which wants to monopolise public opinion. And here the importance of electoral bonds comes into the picture which was conceived to be an instrument of control that is specific to the party in power at the centre.
MONOPOLISING RESOURCES
Fascism or rightwing authoritarianism is propelled by the ruling class with the intent of establishing unabashed corporate interests. It is meant to undermine all sorts of transparency and institutional regulations that make governments answerable to the people. True that unlike classical fascism, right-wing authoritarianism does not deny the electoral process but if transactions between people who are economically and politically powerful are kept behind public gaze, forming opinions on political parties or public individuals boils down to a meaningless ritual. Electoral bond was an instrument of hollowing out India’s democracy. It is not only about a nexus between party in power and the corporates, that has occurred time and again and has been identified in different phases of Indian politics, but something more and deeper. It is about building cumulative dependence and quid pro quo over the years, institutionalise it and by this process making opposition parties completely anaemic in terms of resources. The intent was to keep this unholy reciprocity immune from public scrutiny.
BJP aimed at monopolising economic and political resources by way of legalising extortion and arm-twisting. It has been well documented by now, how ED raids became instrumental in mobilising resources through electoral bonds or policies being framed to suit particular companies who paid kickbacks through electoral bonds. All tall claims of ‘party with a difference’ fell flat and the angry BJP is now trying every other way to suffocate the opposition either by arresting opposition leaders or by freezing bank accounts of opposition parties. A total amount of Rs 12,769 crores has been mobilised from corporates for political funding of which 47 per cent goes to a single party BJP.
It is different from a transfer on behalf of the Indian State in maintaining hegemony of the ruling class as a whole. Rather it is a reversal of a different kind, a more partisan mode of extortion in mobilising political opinion and perpetuating loyalty on a single party. And more importantly the burden of such extortion faced by the corporates would eventually be passed onto the masses through raising prices. But the Indian judiciary found this non-transparent way of monopolising resources as inappropriate for Indian democracy. Perhaps the Indian ruling class also is not yet prepared to close all options of plurality in the political system. History has shown time and again that fascists were called upon in particular contexts of crisis that required a decisive move towards corporate interests but resistance of people has also taught the ruling class the necessity of keeping alive other bourgeoisie alternatives in order to contain an explosion towards a radical structural change.
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