Amit Shah and Narendra Modi at a rally. (File Photo)
The scrapping of the Electoral Bond Scheme by the Supreme Court in February 2024 has not made any dent on the donations received in the following financial year by Bharatiya Janata Party, the party ruling at the Centre. In fact, donations have risen sharply in 2024-25, the first full year after the scheme allowing anonymous donations was junked.
According to the BJP’s Contribution Report for 2024-25, the year Lok Sabha elections were held, the party received Rs 6,088 crore during the year, about 53 per cent higher than Rs 3,967 crore received in 2023-24. The report, submitted by the BJP on December 8, was published by the Election Commission last week.
BJP’s corpus is almost 12 times bigger than Congress’s at Rs 522.13 crore in 2024-25. Including Congress, the donations of a dozen Opposition parties added up to Rs 1,343 crore. So, BJP got 4.5 times the total contributions to the dozen parties.
A comprehensive reading of the BJP’s 162-page Contribution Report revealed that in 2024-25, electoral trusts donated Rs 3,744 crore to the BJP. This accounts for 61 per cent of the total contributions received by the party. The balance Rs 2,344 crore came from contributions by others, including individuals and corporates.
Besides the trusts, several companies figure among the BJP’s top 30 donors during 2024-25. These are: Serum Institute of India Pvt Ltd (Rs 100 crore), Rungta Sons Private Limited (Rs 95 crore) and Vedanta Limited (Rs 67 crore). Other significant donors include Macrotech Developers Limited (Rs 65 crore), Derive Investments (Rs 53 crore), Modern Road Makers Pvt Ltd (Rs 52 crore) and Lotus Hometextiles Limited (Rs 51 crore).
Safal Goyal Realty LLP (Rs 45 crore), ITC Limited (Rs 39 crore), Global Ivy Ventures LLP (Rs 35 crore), ITC Infotech India Ltd (Rs 33.5 crore), Hero Enterprises Partner Ventures (Rs 30 crore), Mankind Pharma Limited (Rs 30 crore), Suresh Amritlal Kotak (Rs 30 crore), and Hindustan Zinc Limited (Rs 27 crore) are also some other big contributors to the party in 2024-25.
In fact, donations to the BJP in 2024-25 are the highest in the last six years since 2019-20.
The BJP’s Contribution Report covers all individual donations over Rs 20,000. As of now, corporates can make donations through cheque, Demand Draft or bank transfers to parties. The parties are required to declare these donations in their contribution reports and annual audit reports submitted to the EC.
The government had introduced the Electoral Bond Scheme in 2017-2018. Until last year, bonds were one of the primary channels of funding political parties. Except for the Covid-19 year, bonds accounted for at least half the total contributions received by the BJP.
Elaborating on bonds, the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said: “The conventional practice of funding the political system was to take donations in cash and undertake these expenditures in cash. The sources are anonymous or pseudonymous. The quantum of money was never disclosed… I do believe that donations made online or through cheques remain an ideal method of donating to political parties. However, these have not become very popular in India since they involve disclosure of the donor’s identity.”
Under the scheme, political parties have over the years received over Rs 16,000 crore in anonymous donations, the majority being received by the BJP. After declaring the scheme unconstitutional, the Supreme Court had in February 2024 ordered the State Bank of India and the ECI to publish the names of all donors and beneficiaries.
(With inputs from Devansh Mittal, Saman Husain, Asad Rehman, Anonna Dutt, Amrita Nayak Dutta, and Harikishan Sharma)