BJP Secured Lion’s Share of Bonds Before 2019 General Election As Well

Including From Companies Under Government Scrutiny

Newsreel Asia Insight #171
March 25, 2024

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received 27.19 billion rupees, or 93% of the total 29.02 billion rupees donated to 13 political parties through electoral bonds between April 12 and May 10, 2019, as per the Election Commission of India’s data released on March 21, The Wire reports.

In the detailed breakdown of these contributions, the Congress party emerged as a distant second, securing just 3.2% of the total, equivalent to 950 million rupees, according to The Wire. Leading the list of donors was Mahendra Jalan’s group of companies, with Madanlal Limited contributing 1.75 billion rupees, Keventer Food Park Infra Limited 1.4 billion rupees, and MKJ Enterprises Limited 140 million rupees.

MEIL, under the helm of P.V. Krishna Reddy and P.P. Reddy, stood as the second-highest donor, allocating 1.2 billion rupees to the BJP in the specified period. This financial engagement was notably after the income tax department’s “inspection” of MEIL’s offices in October 2019. Following the inspection, MEIL was involved in significant government projects and invested 9.8 billion rupees in electoral bonds.

Other prominent donors to the BJP included Vedanta Limited with 526 million rupees, Essel Mining and Industries Limited with 500 million rupees, and both Bajaj Group and PHL Fininvest Private Limited each donating 400 million rupees. Noteworthy individual contributions came from industrialist Laxmi Niwas Mittal with 350 million rupees and Sun Pharma Laboratories Limited with 315 million rupees.

A peculiar case was the DLF group, which exclusively contributed 250 million rupees to the BJP. This transaction took place after the Central Bureau of Investigation’s January 2019 search of DLF offices concerning alleged land allocation irregularities. The DLF group’s involvement gained further attention due to a controversial land deal with Robert Vadra’s Sky Light, which was cancelled by a Haryana officer on Sept. 18, 2012, leading to a public outcry and subsequent legal and political actions by the BJP’s state government in Haryana. Despite these controversies, it was reported in April of the previous year that the high court was told no legal violation was found. Vadra is former Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law.

The Land deal was a prominent issue in the 2014 election campaign leading to the BJP’s victory, Scroll.in noted.

The recently revealed data on electoral bonds “shows the DLF group made its first donation to the BJP through electoral bonds in October 2019. It kept giving the party money through 2020, 2021 and 2022, making the last round of donations through bonds purchased in November 2022,” according to Scroll.in. “Five months later, on April 19, 2023, during a hearing of a petition related to cases against elected representatives, Haryana’s BJP government told the Punjab and Haryana High Court that “no regulation/rules have been violated” in the 2012 land transaction between Vadra and DLF.”

The disproportionate amount of donations received by the BJP, in comparison to other parties, in the previous general election raises critical questions about the impact of such financial contributions on the democratic process at the time.