New Delhi: In the financial year 2021-22, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received nearly 80% (Rs 614 crore) of the total funds (Rs 780 crore) donated to the eight national parties in the country, the latest report published by Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) revealed.
The Congress party stood a distant second in comparison by receiving Rs 95 crore, and the Nationalist Congress party (NCP) secured third place with Rs 58 crore.
The ADR report, released on Tuesday, Februay 14, also revealed that 80% of donations made to the eight national parties came from corporates and business houses, which amounted to Rs 625 crore out of Rs 780 crore. As the largest beneficiary of the donations, BJP received Rs 548 crore from corporates and business houses.
The figures put out by ADR match with and are in the same order which the Election Commission of India (ECI) had published in November 2022. The poll body had said that for the financial year 2021-22, the BJP received Rs 614.52 crore, Congress Rs 95.45 crore, and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Rs 44.54 crore.
ADR has been, for long, working on electoral and political reforms in India, by conducting election watches and annual political party watches. The latter constitutes analysis of donations received by political parties (both national and regional) above Rs 20,000 and income tax returns of parties.
The latest report by ADR took into account all donations above Rs 20,000 that national political parties received during the financial year 2021-22, as per details submitted by the parties to the ECI. It examined the data for eight national parties: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Indian National Congress (INC), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) and the National People’s Party (NPEP).
The report found that all eight national parties together received 7,141 number of donations in total in the year 2021-22, amounting to Rs 780.7 crore. The amount is up by around 30% from the previous year (Rs 593.7 crore came from just 3,753 donations for fiscal 2020-21, as per the last year’s ADR report).
Based on the details declared by the BJP, it received the lion’s share: a total of Rs 614.626 crore from 4,957 donations. In comparison, the BJP had received a total of Rs 477.5 crore from 2,206 donations for financial year 2020-21.
From 1,255 donations in the financial year 2021-22, the Congress garnered Rs 95.4 crore in funds. The NCP came next by securing donations worth almost Rs 58 crore.
The funds received by the BJP in form of donations, for 2021-22, are more than three times the aggregate declared by six parties – INC, NCP, CPI, CPI(M), NPEP and AITC – the report noted.
The BJP’s share of corporate donations, amounting to Rs 548 crore, is more than seven times of the total funds received by other national parties from business houses. Barring BJP, the seven national parties cumultaively received Rs 77 crore from corporate houses.
According to the report, Prudent Electoral Trust emerged as the largest donor to political parties that year. Of the total Rs 353 crore it donated, BJP secured Rs 336.5 crore, and the Congress only Rs 16.50 crore. The BJP received more than half of its funds from Prudent Electoral Trust, while Congress got 17.28% of the total funds from the same source.
As many as 4,506 individual donors donated Rs 153.328 crore (almost 20% of the total donations) to the parties during the year 2021-22.
The report noted that the BJP, INC and CPI(M) had not declared the Premanent Account Number (PAN) details of 452 donations through which the parties collected a total of Rs 10.843 crore (which is 1.389% of the total donations declared by all eight parties). Of the total donations, 62 – submitted by six parties including the BJP and INC – have missing or incorrect PAN details. More than 1,500 donations declared by five parties also had incomplete cheque or DD details.
“Thus, without the complete cheque/DD details, it would be a time-consuming process to link the donors against their donations and hence, trace the money trail,” the report noted. It also noted that just as it did over the last 16 years, the BSP has “remarkably declared again” that the party did not receive any donations above Rs. 20,000.
The ADR report also made several recommendations. One is that full details of all donors be made available for public scrutiny under the Right To Information Act. Countries including Bhutan, Nepal, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Bulgaria, the US and Japan have already done this, the report said. “In none of these countries is it possible for nearly 50% of the source of funds to be unknown, but at present it is so in India.”
National and regional political parties must also provide all information of their finances under the RTI, the report said, adding that this would “go a long way in strengthening political parties, elections and democracy”.
Please visit our website London Institute of Peace Research for latest peace news
