Despite their pivotal role in the democratic process, political parties in India operate within a limited framework of legal accountability. Discuss.

Political parties are the central institutions of Indian democracy — they aggregate interests, select candidates, form governments, and constitute the legislature. Yet the Indian Constitution does not mention them as actors; it mentions them only in the Tenth Schedule as grounds for disqualification. The institutions that run democracy are almost entirely ungoverned by it.

The minimal framework of legal accountability

• Section 29A RPA 1951 :registration without compliance — A party applying for registration must pledge allegiance to the Constitution, socialism, secularism, and democratic principles. Once registered, compliance with these pledges is never verified. The pledge is an entry ticket, not an ongoing obligation.
• fewer than 10% contest elections: the remainder function as legal shells for money laundering without legal consequence.
• ECI cannot de-register: The most significant structural gap: ECI has no power under RPA to de-register a party for non-compliance, fraudulent accounts, or electoral malpractice.
• Ex: 2,550+ parties are registered with ECI;
  • Ex: ECI has repeatedly sought this power from Parliament — Parliament, constituted of parties that benefit from weak regulation, has not acted.

The cap on individual candidate expenditure (₹95 lakh for LS) has no corresponding party expenditure cap

• Recognised party status confers enormous material benefits: free broadcast time on Doordarshan and All India Radio, reserved election symbols, access to voter lists
• The RTI Act explicitly exclusion of political parties: CIC's 2013 ruling that six national parties are "public authorities" under Section 2(h) was ignored by all six parties, and no enforcement action was taken for over a decade Inner party democracy — the deepest accountability deficit
• Section 29A(5) requires a procedural pledge to democratic functioning — it does not require actual internal elections.
  • Ex: The Congress party conducted its first contested presidential election in 22 years in 2022 — the Kharge-Tharoor contest — and it was widely characterised as controlled rather than competitive.

No major national party conducts genuine candidate-selection primaries. Constitutional implications Art. 19(1)(c) guarantees the right to form associations, courts have held this limits the state's power to impose internal democracy on parties. The tension is real: compelled internal elections may violate associational freedom; but unaccountable parties violate democratic representation. Ex: Law Commission 255th Report (2015) recommended statutory inner-party democracy, unimplemented a decade later.

Constitutional implications of unaccountable parties

• Parties exercise Tenth Schedule power: recommending disqualification of their own elected legislators, without being subject to any constitutional accountability for how they exercise it; they wield constitutional power without constitutional obligation.
• Art. 19(1)(a) right to information is constitutionally violated (ADR v.

Union of India (2024) held voters have a fundamental right to know political funding sources; parties that resist RTI simultaneously claim constitutional protection under Art. 19(1)(c) while denying voters their Art. 19(1)(a) right.

• The CIC's 2013 ruling that parties are "public authorities" under RTI was ignored by all six national parties without consequence — demonstrating that where the regulator cannot enforce and Parliament will not act, constitutional obligations become voluntary.
• Law Commission 170th Report (1999) held that "democracy and accountability constitute the core of our constitutional system — the same must bind political parties which form the government, man Parliament, and run governance" — a 25-year-old constitutional imperative unimplemented.
• Parties claim tax exemption under Section 13A Income Tax Act — receiving public subsidy — while refusing public accountability; the beneficiary of state resources cannot constitutionally claim exemption from the transparency obligations that state resources attract.

Art. 326 universal suffrage is structurally undermined when the choice presented to voters is pre-filtered by unaccountable internal party decisions, popular sovereignty is exercised over a menu designed by institutions that answer to no one.

Way forward:

• Enact a Political Parties Act modelled on Germany's Parteiengesetz 1967: mandating internal elections, CAG audit of accounts, ECI deregistration power, and expenditure caps on party spending.
• Grant ECI statutory de-registration power: the 2002 SC ruling allows deregistration only for fraud or anti-constitutional behaviour; a Political Parties Act should extend this to non-filing of accounts, non-contesting of elections for two consecutive cycles, and non-compliance with disclosure norms.
• State funding conditioned on accountability: Indrajit Gupta Committee (1998) recommended partial state funding only conditional on mandatory internal elections, audited accounts, and candidate disclosure; conditionality is the missing element.
• Bring parties under RTI with defined exemptions: classify internal policy deliberations as exempt while mandating disclosure of financial transactions, candidate selection criteria, and office-bearer salaries; the UK model permits this balance.
• Real-time digital disclosure of donations and expenditure: ECI's de-listing exercise (2025) recommended digitised and geotagged office validation; extend this to real-time donation disclosure replacing the annual filing that is routinely manipulated.
• Make non-disclosure of criminal antecedents a ground for voiding election under S.100 RPA — giving Public Interest Foundation (2019) directions the enforcement teeth they currently lack.
• Mandatory primaries for candidate selection with ECI oversight: if voters select candidates, criminal records become liabilities; if party bosses select, criminal records are irrelevant to selection.
• Cap party-level election expenditure: parties spent ₹1.35 lakh crore in 2024 (Centre for Media Studies) with no legal ceiling; individual candidate caps (₹95 lakh) are meaningless without a corresponding party cap.

Law Commission's 170th Report said it in 1999: parties that form governments, man Parliaments, and run governance must be bound by the same democratic and accountability principles they claim to uphold. Twenty-five years later, the sentence remains more aspiration than architecture and every election cycle in between has been the cost of that delay.