The UPA can’t make up its mind. First it said the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) should restrict itself only to checking accounts and not question those figures. Now, it is saying that the election commission of India (ECI) should restrict itself and not check accounts.

The CAG should be a mere accountant, and ECI should be anything but an accountant.

Unlike the one-liner to the CAG, the one for ECI has come up in an affidavit before the supreme court in a case of paid news involving former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan.

The union government told the apex court that, in its view, the ECI has no power to disqualify a candidate on grounds of ‘correctness or otherwise’ of his/her election accounts. A counter-affidavit filed by the union law ministry on behalf of the government in the Ashok Chavan case asserts that “the power of the ECI to disqualify a person arises only in the event of failure to lodge an account of expenses and not for any other reason, including the correctness or otherwise of such accounts,” the Hindu reports.

[For more on Ashok Chavan’s case, read more here: Is the ‘Era of Ashok’ a new era for ‘news’?]

The argument is as absurd as it is dangerous. Absurd because, as one unnamed ECI source told the Hindu, “a candidate can fill in zeros in every column [of the statement of expenditure] and submit his accounts without fear. As long as he lodges them and does so on time.” Dangerous because at a time when an impartial ECI is fighting the menace of paid news, the government is intent on throwing a spanner in the works — only to save a Congress leader.
Moreover, the issue on hand goes beyond the phenomenon of paid news. If the ECI has no powers to check the account of expenses, it cannot tackle a worse menace either — that of black money.

Be it paid news or black money, either way it is a question of the misuse of money power in winning elections. To counter that trend, the ECI has taken several proactive measures: it has established an ‘expenditure monitoring division’ headed by a top income tax official and deployed Indian revenue service (IRS) officers as ‘expenditure observers’ in the five assembly elections. To save Chavan’s skin, the government seems intent on jeopardising this initiative too.

Moreover, as the Hindu report points out, the government affidavit goes counter to the supreme court judgment in the R Shivarama Gowde vs PM Chandrashekar case (AIR 1999 SC. 252). A full bench of the apex court had then ruled: “The commission can go into the correctness of election expenses filed by the candidate and disqualify a candidate under section 10A of Representation of the People Act 1951.”

If you look at the affidavit with a long-term perspective, it is just another of the political establishment’s ways to block any attempt to cleanse the electoral process, the very foundation of democracy. As our columnist Jagdeep Chhokar commented last year:

Any action taken by anyone, including the ECI, to cleanse the electoral process of its infirmities is looked at with suspicion and opposed. The ECI has been on this receiving end since the early 1990s. Its recent actions to minimise the ill effects of money and muscle powers on the outcome of elections are what the political establishment considers to be “the problems which have erupted in the country, from time to time, in the last few years”. [Veto vote on electoral reforms].

Also read: Paid news: Press Council's sham report to hide Indian media's shame