Electoral bond betrays BJP’s Ram Rajya

Funding from big businesses skew, even hijack, government policies. Representation pic

The Bharatiya Janata Party passed a resolution in its national council meeting, on February 18, that the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya heralds the establishment of Ram Rajya, which Mahatma Gandhi imagined as the Kingdom of God, perfect and just. Following the disclosure of the Electoral Bond (EB) data, the BJP's Ram Rajya will be popularly perceived as one deploying investigative/coercive agencies to extract hafta from businesses, a charge Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, too, has made.

Hafta is a colloquial term for the phenomenon of toughies leveraging their muscle power to levy a fee on traders in return for not disrupting their business. The EB data show at least 21, including three of the top 10, donors to political parties encountered raids and probes by the Enforcement Directorate, Income Tax department and Central Bureau of Investigation.

Unless the unique alpha numeral of each EB is made public and donors and recipients matched, a direct coercion-donation link cannot be established with certainty. Nevertheless, a month before the EB data grabbed headlines, Newslaundry and The News Minute (NL-TNM), through their joint investigation, showed that at least 30 companies facing action from agencies together donated Rs 335 crore to the BJP, between 2018-19 and 2022-23. Of them, 23 had never donated to the BJP after 2014, until the year in which they were raided.

The EB data, therefore, only reinforce the suspicion engendered by NL-TNM's statistics that State coercion fuelled donations. This only the blind BJP bhakt will disbelieve. Here are more NL-TNM data for him/her to mull - six of the 30 firms, already BJP's donors, handed out bigger amounts to the party than before in the months following the raids on them. Another six were donating to the BJP, but were raided in the year they missed a payment to the BJP. This echoes the lore that warns of dire consequences for those who fail to pay even an instalment of hafta.

Our democracy acquiring Orwellian traits is best illustrated through the story of Future Gaming and Hotel Services Pvt Ltd, which belongs to India's lottery king, Santiago Martin. His son Charles reportedly joined the BJP in 2015, with the Martins perhaps deluding themselves that they had got away cheap. After the Income Tax Department searched 70 locations linked to Future Gaming in 2019, it donated, in the next financial year, R100 crore to Prudent Electoral Trust, which pools contributions from companies and distributes the collection to different political parties. That year, Prudential allocated 84 per cent of its purse of R245 crore to the BJP. Martin also tops the EB data on donors.

It can scarcely be a Ram Rajya in which the Modi government has devised a scheme enabling suspected shell companies, which pepper the EB data, to legitimately dish out funds to political parties - for firms to donate many times over their profits, for entities to contribute to political funds soon after being birthed. The EB scheme is arguably India's biggest scam since 1947, with the BJP pocketing 50.1 per cent of EBs worth R16,461.1 crore.

Indeed, the BJP has taken the mickey out of Ram Rajya.

Opposition parties received EBs, more likely in exchange for awarding contracts to the donors than by deploying instruments of coercion, for these are largely the Centre's monopoly. The suspected quid pro quo involved here cannot be condoned. That said, it makes little sense for firms facing investigation to make hefty payments to the Opposition, whose leaders themselves have been preyed upon by investigative/coercive agencies.

And anyway, Opposition leaders never depicted themselves as squeaky-clean. They, unlike Prime Minister Narendra Modi, did not go around saying, "Na khayenge, na khane denge-will not make money, nor let others do so." It is the BJP that has insatiably feasted on the EB scheme spiced with coercion, quid pro quo, and fear of the State.

The EB scam has revealed two issues requiring correction. Funding from big businesses skew, even hijack, government policies. No wonder, activists are labelled Maoist and arrested-some of the 16 accused in the Bhima Koregaon case are prime examples-only because they oppose the appropriation of tribal land for mining companies, who are among the big donors in the EB data. For this reason, political donations from companies should be banned. Instead, a cess should be imposed on them-and the money thus collected should be distributed by the Election Commission among the political parties according to a formula.

The EB scam underscores the necessity of making the democratic process transparent. The scheme was subverted because of its opacity. Likewise, the electronic voting system is opaque-voters can't see whether their votes were registered and counted as cast via the Electronic Voting Machine. After the EB disclosures, we cannot presume that a ruling party, vested with the power to determine the composition of the Election Commission, will not hack or manipulate the EVM.

This is why the Supreme Court, in its hearing on a petition this week, should think of asking EVM counts in each constituency to be matched with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, or VVPAT, slips. Let us face it: BJP's Ram Rajya has a dark side.

The writer is a senior journalist

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