Rs 17k-cr donation to six unknown Gujarat parties raises concerns

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments at the centre and in Gujarat will find it difficult to explain how six Gujarat-based registered unrecognised and unknown political parties received Rs 1,700.78 crore in donations in 2023-24. This amount was Rs 200 crore more than the total income of five non-BJP national parties.

This was even though the six parties hardly put up candidates. This is the finding of a BBC Hindi investigative report. To be sure, this is still a media report; nothing has been officially established, as no inquiry has been conducted. But then, this begs the question: why? If there is even an iota of truth in the news report, the Union and state governments should have been aware of it. Worse, the needle of suspicion points towards the BJP, for Gujarat is its bastion, having ruled it for three decades. For some reason, this news has not hit the media headlines, but this doesn’t mean that it will necessarily fade away.

For instance, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh has accused the BJP of large-scale corruption, citing alleged donations to six small political parties; the quantum of money they received, according to him, was much higher at Rs 5,500 crore during 2023-24. He went on to claim the “six unknown political parties” were the biggest channel for laundering black money. “… this money didn’t go to these parties but to BJP through them. These parties have no existence.

They fielded only 15 candidates combined in the Lok Sabha polls,” he said, adding that these were BJP’s dummy parties. The revelations about half-a-dozen unknown parties come at a time when the Narendra Modi regime is buffeted by various cases of corruption and financial irregularities. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav’s family and their real estate businesses, according to a newspaper report, “acquired at least 137 plots spanning 168 acres in Ujjain for Rs 45 crore in two years since December 2023—mostly in areas benefiting from road projects and land-use changes his government announced.”

There is the IDFC scam in Haryana. In Uttar Pradesh, the shoddy state of the Kanpur-Lucknow highway shortly after its inauguration has also been covered by the mainstream media. The fact that the owner of the company that made the road is the brother of a BJP MP has also raised questions about the saffron party’s commitment to propriety in public life. There is the big issue of donation theft in Ayodhya’s Ram temple, with several Hindutva elements suspected of involvement. And, of course, the NEET row reeked of venality and incompetence, which resulted in something unprecedented—the resignation of a Union minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, under pressure.

Since Modi’s presence is oversized in governance, the recent revelations have brought his promise of clean government under a cloud. The claim ‘Na khaaunga, na khaane doonge’ doesn’t sound very convincing today. It is time the BJP, and its ideological mentor RSS, realises that the days of dominating the political narrative by raising emotive issues are over. The promise of Viksit Bharat doesn’t sound very convincing against the backdrop of caved-in highways and the water-logged international airport. The ruling dispensation must address the matter of governance and propriety deficits urgently.

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The Hans India