Usually , I read BBC news analysis with more than a truckload of incredulity given the fact of its anti-India prejudice. But this one exception of an article on the Electoral Bond Scheme of India, I confess I really can’t find fault with.
Arun Jaitley’s devious legal brain it was that conceived, introduced and implemented this murky Bond scheme which in effect legalised electoral funding to political parties in perhaps the same way as in some countries prostitution was legalised.
To compare Electoral Bond Scheme to legalised Prostitution racket might seem like an exaggeration. But the perspective does seem to suggest that the two have an uncanny resemblance to each other in many ways more than a dozen perhaps.
Prostitution before it got legalised was considered sleazy . So were electoral donations to India’s political parties before the Scheme was launched by Arun Jaitley in 2018. Such donations were mostly underhand and undercover.
Prostitution rackets have powerful nameless stakeholders who support it from behind the scenes.
The police look the other way for consideration of all sorts, of course. .
The lawyers make sure the conviction rate is low for human-trafficking which is the mainstay of all prostitution. For hefty fees, of course.
The pimps are a notorious gang that runs the entire system like a well-oiled machinery. For a fortune, of course.
The prostitutes themselves ply their trade safely enjoying the consolation of self-esteem the law grants to them. For livelihood and lifestyle, of course.
And lastly, the vast faceless, nameless and trace-less clientele of customers for prostitution, of course, is the biggest and most completely anonymous patron and beneficiary of legal prostitution. For carnal gratification of many sorts, of course.
That’s more or less how exactly the legalised prostitution industry is organised to function and thrive. It thrives because while none of the stakeholders will want to be seen to be involved in any way with Legal Prostitution, everyone will want to nevertheless benefit from it.
Turn now to the Electoral Bond Scheme and the comparison with Legalised Prostitution won’t seem far-fetched or too extreme in drawing parallels.
The Election Commission of India looks the other way on the matter.
The hotshot lawyers of the land are working overtime to come up with a water-tight legal justification to legitimise Bond transactions which otherwise do seem to bear all the hallmarks of gambling/ wagering. (i.e. political donations as a way of betting on which political horse will win elections?)
While the many flim-flamming treasurers of political parties who canvass countrywide for donations through these Bonds are the whole-selling, wheeling-dealing pimps, the State Bank of India, the kingpin of the banking sector in India, is the retailing pimp in the system.
The political parties themselves are to be likened to the prostitutes who drape themselves in purple cloaks of piety and claim squeaky-clean morals: “Electoral bonds represent a “solid progress” towards cleaner political funding”. When Prostitution stands legalised , prostitutes too must stand de-sleazed, of course.
And last but not the least, there is the important player of all in this great Indian legal electoral-scam : the Indian voter-public (growing in size of more than 900 million people!) that patronises the prostitution with it’s largesse that latest estimates peg at $1.15 billion since the Bond Scheme was inaugurated in 2018. (The market-size of Prostitution in India, by the way, is estimated to be c. $8.4 billion). They are the faceless, nameless, trace-less, anonymous donors (individual, institutional, corporate, benami, underworld, black, white, etc.) who buy up these Electoral Bonds and then bring them to the grey market-place to be purveyed by the sleaze-merchants of the great Indian political system.
The deep ethic at the very heart of any legalised prostitution is to provide an conducive environment for carrying on anonymously a systemic human collaboration wherein all stakeholders in it are enabled to do their own part faithfully in the seedy joint-venture in a spirit of mutual cooperation ; and they are each sworn to abide by the cardinal rule of silent conspiracy: You watch my back and I’ll watch yours; you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours…. We’re all one big happy family, after all, aren’t we ?!
Sudarshan Madabushi