The practice of bribing voters during elections is “spreading to all states” in South India barring Kerala, Jayadev Galla, a Telugu Desam Party Member of Parliament said today. The trend is spreading even to the rest of the country but must not be seen in isolation, Galla also said.
Galla’s comments came during a surprisingly frank panel discussion on Day 2 of India Today Conclave South 2018. Galla was part of a panel that included leaders from South India — Congress leader and former Lok Sabha MP Madhu Yaskhi Goud, AIADMK spokesperson Kovai Sathyan and DMK spokesperson Manu Sundaram.
All the politicians on the panel agreed that corruption during elections is a reality and that the society’s attitude towards the idea of corruption must change for the practice to go away.
TDP’s Jayadev Galla said that election corruption reflected a larger trend in the Indian society. There is corruption across professions in India, Galla said. “The public corrupt.”
Galla also said that the solution for this problem is that the “middle class has to vote” since the “poor [are] the most susceptible.”
The Congress leader Madhu Goud, however, differed with Galla on that point. “[It is] not just the poor who is taking money. Even the educated, working class is taking money,” Goud said. The Congress leader also said that the media was also corrupt when it came to elections.
Goud said that there have been instances when local journalists asked politicians for money in lieu of either writing a positive article about them or for not carrying a certain story.
India needs “electoral reforms like those in the United States,” Goud also said.
The DMK’s Manu Sundaram and the AIADMK’s Kovai Sathyan agreed with this. Sundaram said that one of the biggest factors behind corruption during elections was the availability of unaudited funding to political parties.
“We are talking about a system where everyone is involved. The politician is pumping in money. The public is accepting the money… Need electoral reforms,” Sathyan said.
Galla, however, had a larger point: Corruption, the TDP MP said, is ingrained “in our culture and religion”. “We [even] pay money to gods for favours… it [corruption] is in our psyche.”
