In the year 2019-2020, with the permission of the election commission, all the electoral bonds were sold. The net worth was Rupees 3555 crore. Out of this, the Bharatiya Janata Party received 76% which was a whooping worth of Rupees 2555 crore. This was a 75% jump from the total worth of the electoral bonds that the party had received in the year 2018-2019. In that particular year, the total worth was Rupees 1450 crores.
Now the question arises: what are electoral bonds? Electoral bonds are a kind of monetary instrument that various corporate groups or citizens can buy from a bank. After this, they can give the bonds to any political party. Later on, these political parties can redeem them for money. The former Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley wanted to make government funding a transparent process. So, he announced this scheme of receiving donated electoral bonds by the political parties in his Budget speech in 2017. He said that the government wanted to clean up political funding. However, we must keep in mind that the entire process is anonymous. No one is required to say out loud their purchase of these bonds. Similarly, the political parties are also not required to declare the source of their money. People may say that the money is “black.” But here, the government intervened. It said that the money was unlikely to be “black” because it has to be given by cheque. Now, coming back to the bonds, these are issued four times a year The months are January, April, July, and October. However, in the last year, January and October are the only months when it was issued.
In the year 2019-2020, Congress also received some electoral bonds. But the price dropped by 17% to Rupees 318 crores. The year before that was financially more beneficial to them. It is so because in the year 2018-2019, Congress had received Rupees 383 crore by selling those bonds. Now here is a list of the amount of money various parties received by selling the bonds. The Trinamool Congress received Rupees 100.46 crore worth of electoral bonds, the Aam Aadmi party received Rupees 18 crore, the Nationalist Congress Party received Rupees 29.25 crore, the Rashtriya Janata Dal received Rupees 2.5 crore, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam received Rupees 45 crore and the Shiv Sena received Rupees 41 crore.
A non-profit organization, Association for Democratic Reforms stated in its report that in March last year, the seven national parties of India received a total sum of Rupees 3749.37 crore in the financial year 2018-2019. 67% of the money came from “unknown sources” which could not be traced. Donations that are less than Rupees 20,000 and are declared as income in tax returns but with no identifiable sources are classified as earnings from sources unknown. Such sources may be relief funds, coupons, contributions from meetings, and also electoral bonds. The saffron party finally received Rupees 2555 crore worth of electoral bonds.
