Data Dump exposes the blurred boundaries between money and politics in India

Politics in India is an expensive business, and sometimes lucrative. In this year’s elections, the parties are expected to spend more than $14 billion – the same as in the United States. But there is little transparency about the enormous amounts of money lying around.

A rare and chaotic beam of light shot through the darkness Thursday evening. Under orders from India’s Supreme Court, the State Bank of India handed over large amounts of data to the Election Commission showing who had sent money to the country’s political parties through a mechanism known as electoral bonds.

Reading between the lines of the spreadsheets full of names, questions arise about the intersection of government and business in India. Construction companies, gambling impresarios, pharmaceutical bosses and many more corporate entities and individuals had split more than $1.7 billion in bonds since 2019. Many eventually won government contracts. Most had had problems with the federal police.

Jairam Ramesh, leader of the opposition Indian National Congress, said a clear picture has emerged: that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has used law enforcement agencies to extort companies to fill its coffers.

“In my opinion, this is the biggest scandal of independent India,” Mr. Ramesh said. The way the country’s top law enforcement and financial crime agencies “have been used to instill fear in people,” he added, “has never happened before.”

Mr Ramesh’s party has also deposited electoral bonds worth at least $170 million. But Modi’s BJP, which controls both the budget and federal agencies, has received almost four times as much since 2019, more than the next six parties combined.

It will take days, if not weeks, to analyze the full scope of this data dump. Meanwhile, the election season is reaching a fever pitch. The voting dates will be announced on Saturday; they will probably extend from April to May.

Electoral bonds are just one avenue for campaign financing, but they have attracted more attention than any other since the BJP introduced them nearly seven years ago.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the list of donors are the names that are not on it. The Adani Group, the giant conglomerate whose value has grown by almost a thousand percent since Modi came to power, does not appear anywhere. Neither does Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, although his Reliance Industries has a circuitous connection to the third-largest donor on the list.

Directors from the board of Qwik Supply Chain, which has bought about $50 million worth of electoral bonds, sit on the boards of Reliance companies. Reliance issued a statement saying Qwik Supply “is not a subsidiary of any Reliance entity.”

The largest buyer was a company called Future Gaming and Hotel Services, which raised $165 million in bonds. The owner, Santiago Martin, often portrayed as India’s ‘lottery king’, was under investigation for money laundering. He was also involved in a dispute with the state of Tamil Nadu, which tried to ban gambling but was opposed by the national government.

Ironically, the electoral bond system was promoted as a means of lending legitimacy to a hodgepodge of mostly illegal financing practices that all parties had been using for decades. Donors anonymously bought bonds from the state bank and then passed them on to politicians. Critics immediately complained that this process merely formalized the secrecy.

Modi’s government had come to power in 2014 following a series of financial scandals that humiliated his predecessors. Subsequently, an anti-corruption campaign strengthened his campaign. Still, any revelations cannot be expected to lead to widespread protest at this point. The Indian media reliably supports Mr. Modi’s government.

Democracy activists had petitioned the country’s highest court in 2017 to declare the new fundraising model unconstitutional, on the grounds that it lacked transparency and denied a level playing field for different parties.

“The whole idea of ​​anonymous donations was to make money, to get kickbacks, anonymous kickbacks. It is clear that almost everything is a bribe,” said Prashant Bhushan, one of the lawyers who filed the case against the government.

Jagdeep Chhokar, an activist who petitioned the court, said that with Thursday’s release of the data, banking authorities have still not revealed the “granular details” – for example, “which company has given exactly how much money to which party donated on what date. ”

Since the day the policy was drafted, Mr. Chhokar says, he and other activists have argued “that this is the way to legalize something that is patently wrong.”

Nirmala Sitharaman, the government’s finance minister, rejected any accusations of quid pro quo, saying there was nothing to link raids by investigative agencies and funding, and that such allegations were merely “assumptions.”

“Was the system 100 percent perfect before that? No,” Ms. Sitharaman told an Indian television channel. “This is certainly not perfect, but it is a bit better.”

Electoral bonds as a mechanism may disappear after the Supreme Court ruled against them a month ago, but their story is not over. On Friday, the Chief Justice of India issued another directive to the State Bank of India. Why, he wondered, did it not provide the bond identification numbers, which would show which political group got money from where?

“The judgment of the Constitution Bench clarified that all details of electoral bonds will be made available, including date of purchase, name of purchaser and denomination,” wrote the judge, Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud. He instructed the bank to complete the missing facts by Monday.

Sameer Yasir And Suhasini Raj reporting contributed.