Sukirti Bajpai*
Introduction
Every election season in India produces a fresh stack of paper promises, and this year that stack has an unusually strange addition. In May 2026, a Supreme Court remark comparing unemployed youth to “cockroaches” spawned an entire satirical movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, complete with its own five-point manifesto: no Rajya Sabha berths for retiring Chief Justices, criminal prosecution of election officials over deleted votes, fifty per cent reservation for women in Parliament and Cabinet, and the cancellation of media licences held by two of the country’s best-known business houses. The party is not registered with the Election Commission and has never appeared on a ballot, but that is precisely what makes it useful here. It asks, in the most irreverent way possible, a very old question: once a party writes something down and asks for a vote in exchange, does it owe the voter anything at all?
Compare that with Tamil Nadu, where actor-turned-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam released its 2026 election manifesto – a monthly payment of ₹2,500 to women heads of households, two hundred free units of electricity, six free cooking-gas cylinders a year, farm-loan waivers, an AI ministry, and a stated ambition of a ₹150-lakh-crore state economy by 2036. TVK went on to emerge as the single largest party in the Assembly. Somewhere between the two sits the BJP’s 2024 Sankalp Patra, titled “Modi’s Guarantee: Developed India 2047,” which folds welfare schemes, tribal-development funding and space missions into a long national arc rather than a single term of office. Three documents, three registers – satire, populist welfare, and long-horizon governance branding yet all three sit on the same shaky legal ground. India’s law does not, in any direct sense, tell a party it must do what its manifesto says.
The Current Legal Framework
The starting point is the Representation of the People Act 1951, which is the closest to an election rulebook. Section 123 defines “corrupt practices,” and for decades the debate has circled around whether a manifesto promise, particularly one involving free goods, cash transfers, or loan waivers, can be treated as a form of bribery under that section. The short answer the courts have given is no: a manifesto is a statement of the policy a party will pursue if it forms the government, not a bribe offered to an individual voter.
As there is no law in place for manifestos, the Election Commission of India, using its powers under Article 324 of the Constitution, has attempted to make up for it by including the clause related to manifestos in the Model Code of Conduct since 2015. The clause states that “Parties shall give a brief rationale behind their promises and how they would generate the funds for fulfilling their promises without limiting the promises they could make or imposing any penalty on unfulfilled promises.” But again, this is only an issue of disclosure and not enforcement.
Three Cases That Shaped the Law
The case of S. Subramaniam Balaji v. Government of Tamil Nadu (2013) remains the leading precedent on the subject. The case arose from Tamil Nadu’s historical pattern of election-time giveaways like free colour TVs promised by the DMK in 2006, then grinders, mixers, fans, and laptops promised by the AIADMK in 2011. An aggrieved voter, S. Subramaniam Balaji, raised a challenge to the public expenditure resulting from the above promises as an unauthorised appropriation of the state treasury and claimed that the promises made were an “electoral bribe” as per Section 123. However, the Supreme Court ruled against this claim regarding electoral bribery. It was contended by the Court that a promise by a party contained in its manifesto cannot constitute an offence under the Act since the provision deals with individual candidates alone. A promise only becomes expenditure once a party secures power and decides to implement its promises as part of its executive policies under the Directive Principles of State Policy. However, the Court also called upon the Election Commission to issue guidelines for disclosing the reasons and sources of funds for such promises. This direction produced the current manifesto clause in the Model Code of Conduct.
Nearly a decade later, a three-judge bench headed by then Chief Justice, N.V. Ramana, came back to Balaji’s line of thinking in the case of Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. Union of India (2022), recognizing that any freebies offered prior to the election and being financed only from public funds may very well lead to imminent bankruptcy of state finances, which was how the Court itself had described the situation. The bench referred some questions to a larger bench, including whether the Balaji case required re-thinking, whether at all a judicially enforceable order could be issued in this context, and whether an expert committee needed to be formed for the evaluation of the fiscal implications of election promises before they are made.
The case of Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms (2002) didn’t deal with manifestos directly, but built the constitutional scaffolding that any future manifesto-accountability regime would have to rest on. The Supreme Court held that the voter’s right to know, in that case, about a candidate’s criminal record, assets and educational qualifications, flows from the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a), because an “aware citizenry” is what makes an election meaningful rather than a formality. The same reasoning was extended in 2024 when the Court struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme, again anchoring the voter’s right to information in Article 19(1)(a). If a voter has a constitutional right to know who a candidate is and who funds a party, there is a reasonably short argumentative distance to the claim that a voter also has a right to a truthful, costed manifesto even though no court has yet been asked to close that distance.
The Historical and Constitutional Backdrop
Manifestos do not appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution, and that absence is not an oversight so much as a reflection of where the framers placed the idea of promises to the people, among the Directive Principles of State Policy. Articles 38 and 39 direct the State to secure a social order for the welfare of the people and to distribute resources for the common good, language that reads almost like a manifesto in itself, except that the Directive Principles are “not enforceable by any court,” even though they remain “fundamental in the governance of the country.” In this respect, a political manifesto operates as an unofficial means of connecting the campaign efforts of the candidate with the welfare objective of the state, which is enshrined in the Constitution.
The Election Commission’s authority to step into this gap traces back to Article 324, which vests “superintendence, direction and control” of elections in the Commission, and which the Supreme Court in cases like Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner has read broadly enough to let the Commission act wherever Parliament has stayed silent. The manifesto clause added to the Model Code of Conduct in 2015 is a direct product of that residual power – useful, but inherently soft, since the Code itself is a set of conventions the Commission enforces through moral suasion and, at most, the withdrawal of campaigning privileges, not through fines or prosecutions.
Why Accountability for Written Promises Actually Matters
It is tempting to treat a manifesto as campaign literature and leave it at that, but the practice of Indian elections suggests otherwise. Regional parties in Tamil Nadu have governed for years on the back of specific manifesto commitments like free televisions, gold for weddings, monthly allowances, etc., which shows that voters do treat these documents as something closer to a contract than a wish-list. TVK’s 2026 manifesto followed exactly that template, translating specific rupee figures into what was, in effect, a governance mandate once the party won. National manifestos operate on a longer and vaguer time horizon. The BJP’s Sankalp Patra framed its commitments against a 2047 target, which makes any single election a progress check rather than a final scorecard, and that longer horizon is itself a legitimate way of structuring a manifesto, not evidence of anything improper.
What should worry anyone thinking about this seriously is not any one party’s manifesto but the structural gap common to all of them: there is no institutional mechanism that compares what was promised against what was delivered, no independent costing requirement with teeth, and no legal, financial, or electoral consequence in any formal sense for a party that campaigns on one set of commitments and quietly abandons them once in office. Voters are left to rely on memory, journalism, and their own scorecard at the next election. A written manifesto, precisely because it is written, ought to be capable of more rigorous scrutiny than an unrecorded campaign speech; at present, the law does not really allow that distinction to do any work.
False Promises, Freebies, and the Case for Expanding ‘Unfair Practices’
This is where the freebies debate becomes more than a fiscal argument. Section 123 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 currently lists a closed set of corrupt practices, i.e. bribery, undue influence, appeals to religion or caste, and the like, and Balaji held that manifesto promises, however lavish, fall outside that list because they are promises of future government policy rather than an inducement offered by a candidate to a specific voter. There is a reasonable argument, echoed in the 2022 reference order, that this line was drawn too generously. A promise that is made with no serious costing, no credible source of funding, and no intention of being fully honoured functions, in practice, exactly like an inducement; it seeks a vote today in exchange for a benefit whose delivery is never actually tested against the state’s fiscal capacity.
Bringing such promises within the ambit of “undue influence” or “unfair practices” under Section 123, or through a dedicated amendment, would not require banning welfare promises. The Directive Principles of India may well ask for such welfare commitment. The need would rather be for commitments to be made conditional upon a financing program that is publicly available, for some form of punishment for false promises made knowingly and visibly, and for the disclosure clause in the Election Commission directive to upgrade from a gentle recommendation to a necessary condition for the issue of a manifesto. Before either the parliament or the pending larger bench reference in the case of Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay makes the law move in this direction, the distinction between a welfare promise and a meaningless vote-catching one will remain a question for economists and columnists to debate.
Conclusion
The satirical party which calls for the arrest of the election commissioners, the regional party which promises rings for all the babies born, or the national party which vows development of India by 2047, regardless of their peculiar content, they all fall under a weird legal category: vital for political reasons, lofty from the constitutional point of view, and completely unenforceable. It is known that the issue has already come before the Supreme Court twice, first in 2013 when it asked the Election Commission to demand better disclosure and then again in 2022 when it doubted whether its previous position was correct without giving an alternative yet. In other words, nothing has changed so far unless either the Supreme Court gives an appropriate solution to the issue or Parliament modifies the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Until that happens, the Indian manifesto will stay what it has always been in Indian politics: a promise that the law requires a political party to make.
* The author is a fourth-year law student at the National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi. The author may be contacted at sukirti.bajpai@nusrlranchi.ac.in.
This blog reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Policy Chronicle.