The Wire’s In-Depth Look at Expenditures on Buildings and Elections

Newsreel Asia Insight #209
May 2, 2024

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has shown significant financial expenditures on infrastructure and election campaigns over recent years. A report by The Wire delves into the BJP’s expenditures, highlighting the scale and implications of its financial operations.

The BJP’s investment in land and buildings is a major aspect of its expenditure, says the report by the Wire. Between the fiscal years 2014-15 and 2022-23, the party reported spending about 11.24 billion rupees on these assets, according to its annual reports. A significant portion of this investment has been directed towards constructing district offices across India. By March 2023, the BJP had completed 290 district offices, with an estimated expenditure of 8.7 billion rupees, assuming a cost of about 30 million rupees per office. Plans for all 887 district offices are projected to reach a whopping 26.61 billion rupees.

Moreover, the party has not limited its construction efforts to smaller offices alone. In major cities like Guwahati and Bhopal, the BJP has embarked on more ambitious projects. The Guwahati office alone cost 2.5 billion rupees, and the projected cost for the Bhopal office stands at 1 billion rupees. With an average expenditure of 250 million rupees for one significant office per state and Union territory, the total comes to around 9 billion rupees.

The BJP’s expenditure on election campaigning is another area where the numbers are staggering. Official reports from FY 2015-16 to FY 2022-23 list a total of 57.44 billion rupees spent on electioneering. However, independent analyses paint a dramatically different picture. The Centre For Media Studies estimated the party’s spending in the 2019 elections alone at close to 270 billion rupees.

This gap raises critical questions about the transparency and accountability of electoral financing in India. The reported expenditure overshooting official caps also suggests a competitive advantage that could potentially skew the electoral playing field in favour of the financially more robust party, impacting the fairness of elections.

The party’s spending prowess extends beyond national elections to state-level contests, where it reportedly expends up to 40 million rupees per seat, significantly surpassing the official expenditure cap. With India hosting over 4,123 state-level constituencies, each experiencing two elections in the last decade, this translates to an estimated 164.9 billion rupees on state elections alone.

The reported financial activities of the BJP, particularly the contrast between its declared income of 146.63 billion rupees from 2014-15 to 2022-23 and its much higher expenditures, highlight a critical gap in political financing transparency, the report notes. The introduction of electoral bonds was claimed to address these issues by ensuring that political funding is traceable and free from the influence of black money.

Political parties have the autonomy to allocate their privately raised funds as they see fit within the legal framework. This includes spending on infrastructure, campaigns and other party-related activities that they deem necessary to enhance their organisational capacity and electoral prospects. However, the allocation of such large sums to political activities prompts an evaluation of opportunity costs from a broader ethical and strategic perspective.

Even though these funds are privately raised, how they are used can impact public perception of the party’s priorities, especially in a country with significant developmental needs. When a party spends large amounts on campaigns and infrastructure, it may lead to questions about whether such resources could be more beneficially invested in initiatives that directly contribute to societal welfare, even if indirectly related to the party’s goals.

This is particularly critical in the context of transparency and accountability in political financing, where the sources of party funds and their expenditures are of public interest. Citizens and watchdog organisations often scrutinise these aspects to ensure that political contributions and expenditures align with ethical standards and contribute positively to the political landscape.