BJP received almost half of all corporate donations to political parties
After the Supreme Court struck down last month the electoral bonds system, which allowed companies and individuals to make anonymous donations to political parties, the Election Commission was forced to publish information on bonds purchased over the past five years, showing that funding went disproportionately to Modi's party.
New Delhi (AsiaNews) – In compliance with a ruling by the Indian Supreme Court, the Election Commission posted on its website the list of companies that made important donations to Indian political parties in recent years.
It turns out that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own party, received more than all other Indian parties combined, or about US$ 730 million between 2018 and 2023, almost 48 per cent of all donations for that period. Mr Modi is running for a third mandate in upcoming elections in April-May.
On 15 February, the Supreme Court of India abolished the financial system of "electoral bonds", issued by the State Bank of India (SBI).
The mechanism, introduced by the BJP in 2018 allowed individual and corporate donors to give money to parties anonymously protecting their privacy; only the government would know, the BJP said.
Opposition parties saw it as a tool with for big companies to influence government policies. Anyone, even foreign companies could buy bonds in fixed denominations without limits.
The Supreme Court rule the practice unconstitutional, and ordered the Election Commission to release the names of those who made donations in the past five years by 13 March.
However, the documents posted online do not show the serial numbers of the bonds, the court pointed out yesterday, preventing matching the entities that made the donations to the parties that received them.
Data posted online in two separate documents show that between 1 April 2019 and 15 February 2024, 22,217 electoral bonds were purchased and almost all of them were redeemed by political parties.
Future Gaming and Hotel Services was the largest donor, acquiring bonds worth Rs 13 billion (US$ 156.7 million), followed by major mining companies, as well as infrastructure, and telecommunications companies.
Mining companies (like Vedanta Limited, Rungta Sons Private Ltd, Jindal Steel and Power, Essel Mining and Industries Ltd, and Dempo) bought bonds totalling Rs 8.2 billion (US$ 98 million).
The second-largest buyer was the Megha Group, which owns several companies active in the infrastructure sector.
After the BJP, which received Rs 120 billion (US$ 1.5 billion), the second-largest recipient was the Trinamool Congress, a party in West Bengal, led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, with Rs 16 billion (US$ 195 million), while the Indian National Congress (INC), viewed as the most important opposition party, received Rs 14 billion (US$ 170 million dollars).
According to INC spokesman Jairam Ramesh, the data, while incomplete, reveal close ties between the BJP and some of the country's largest companies.
“There are many cases of companies that have donated electoral bonds, and immediately afterwards gotten huge benefits from the government,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Noting that there is a lack of electoral bond data for the period prior to 2019, he asks: “Where is the data of these missing bonds, from March 2018 to April 2019?”
Yesterday, the Election Commission asked the Supreme Court to return part of the information that had been delivered to the court in a sealed envelope, stating that it had not kept any copies of the data and therefore could not publish the missing information on its website. The Supreme Court was set to hear the matter today.
Meanwhile, Reuters reviewed the public records of the Prudent Electoral Trust (PET), an organisation based in the capital New Delhi that raised US$ 272 million since its creation in 2013, with about 75 per cent going to the BJP.
According to the news agency's inquiry, eight of India's largest business groups donated a total of at least US$ 50 million between 2019 and 2023 to PET, which is the largest of India's 18 electoral trusts and is required by law to declare how much it has raised from each donor and the total amounts handed over to each party.
Between 2013 and 2023, INC also received donations from PET, but only US$ 20.6 million, about one tenth of what the BJP received.
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07/02/2019 17:28
23/02/2024 19:29
