Funding political parties
A difficult question of funding political parties from the state coffer has been launched by TIB, backed by its research, and perhaps seconded by our Election Commission, for discussion. Actually, it's a dilemma that goes beyond Bangladesh. In the absence of mass membership contribution, many political parties, or politicians, rely on private donations to support their activities. But private donations, mostly corporate, are often determined by influence-peddling. So, making a case for public funding of political parties to keep them honest is an option, but isn't easy. It could be a doubled-edged sword, while public money goes to the parties, they can't be made accountable.
Actually, the question displeases people throughout the entire world, developed or underdeveloped, how to fund politics. In a country where we have high levels of poverty, it's very difficult to say that we are going to clean up politics by arranging legal payments to political parties from the state coffers . It is a fact that election, or political financing, is shadowy in Bangladesh as well as elsewhere, in fact everywhere. In most of the functioning democracies, while political parties oversee national campaigns, individual candidates are expected to raise their own campaign funds from private sources. Once elected to parliament, lawmakers start looking for new sources of funding. Many say those sources include bribes from persons, groups or companies seeking favours to get their business contracts approved.
Politicians use their position to raise money because that is what the parties ask them to do, or maybe that is the standard practice everywhere in the free economies. Some of the money goes into their pockets, the rest goes to the parties. State funding for making the lawmakers probably wouldn't stop graft. If we gather experiences from other democracies, we can see that politics, and democracy as well, is getting more and more expensive all over the world.
Some advocate greater transparency in party financing. I think what we can possibly do is publish the sources of our political parties' money and the names of the donors. They should have tax identification numbers, so anybody can trace those persons, or companies.
Apart from the accountability risks, in a multiparty system, public funding of parties must be based on their strength in previous parliaments. Funds for all parties from the national exchequer could also go wrong. We may make it tricky for new parties, our past experience tells us that people from other parties would form new parties just to get money from the state coffer. So, we need to think many times before settling the issue of graft-free funding of political parties.
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