According to statistics from the Election Commission, the BJP received a staggering 76 percent of the electoral bonds offered in the fiscal year 2019-20. In 2019-20, 3,355 crores in electoral bonds were sold, with the BJP earning 2,555 crores. This was a 75 percent increase over the 1,450 crores it got the previous year through electoral bonds.
The Congress, the BJP’s main electoral adversary, saw its revenues decrease by 17% during the same time. The Congress collected 383 crores in electoral bonds in 2018-19. It got 318 crores in 2019-10, accounting for 9% of total electoral bonds.
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Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress got 100.46 crores; Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party got 29.25 crores. Shiv Sena got 41 crores, whereas DMK got 45 crores. Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal got 2.5 crores. Meanwhile, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party got 18 crores.
The BJP earned more than twice as much as its five biggest opponents combined in the fiscal year that ended in March 2019. Since its inception till March 2020, the BJP has received 68 percent of the electoral bonds offered. However, long before the bonds were issued, the party regularly had the most significant income among all political parties.
In the face of intense political resistance, electoral bonds, which the government adopted in 2017-2018, allow people and businesses to anonymously support political parties, even those partly controlled by foreign firms. Overall, political parties saw a significant increase in revenue when the anonymous funding method was implemented.
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Before the bonds were introduced, Congress had claimed that the government was making “corruption official” by issuing them. The administration stated that they would increase openness because they were banking instruments. After all, each political party would have to declare how much money they received.
