Since 2018, BJP got 54.8% of electoral bonds encashed: Data

The BJP’s biggest rival, the Indian National Congress, received 9.4% or ₹1,123.31 crore of all bonds encashed until March 2023.

In 25 phases between March 2018 and March 2023, electoral bonds worth ₹11,984.91 crore were encashed with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) receiving 54.8%, or ₹6,566.12 crore, according to data furnished by political parties to the Election Commission of India and phase-wise data collated by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR).

Expectedly, election years see more activity. In 2019-20 for instance, electoral bonds worth ₹3,429.559 crore were encashed, of which the BJP received 74.5% and the Congress 9.3%. (Representational Image)

The BJP’s biggest rival, the Indian National Congress, received 9.4% or ₹1,123.31 crore of all bonds encashed until March 2023. The Trinamool Congress, which ceased to be a national party in April 2023, received 9.1% or ₹1,092.98 crore. These three parties accounted for 73.3% of all electoral bonds encashed until March 2023.

In all, electoral bonds worth ₹16,518 crore were purchased in the 30 phases of sale of electoral bonds between March 2018 and January 2024, minister of state for finance Pankaj Chaudhary had informed the Lok Sabha on February 5 in a written reply. Of this, 219 bonds worth nearly ₹26 crore have not been encashed and have thus been transferred to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF), according to RTI replies received by transparency activist Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra.

Expectedly, election years see more activity. In 2019-20 for instance, electoral bonds worth ₹3,429.559 crore were encashed, of which the BJP received 74.5% and the Congress 9.3%. And in 2018-19 (in the run up to the national elections; they were announced in March 2019, which falls in 2018-19, but conducted in April and May 2019, which fall in 2019-20), bonds worth ₹2,540 crore were encashed.

Keeping with that trend 2023-24 has already seen this record being breached, with sale of electoral bonds in five tranches aggregating ₹4,509 crore. Details of amount encashed by different political parties in these are not yet available because the political parties have not filed their annual audit report for FY2024.

The BJP has consistently received the highest share of electoral bonds encashed in a year -- not surprising, given that the party is the national political hegemon -- through this period except in 2020-21, when the YSRCP received ₹96.25 crore of the ₹324.4 crore of bonds encashed that year, followed by the DMK at ₹80 crore and BJD at ₹67 crore. The BJP only received ₹22.38 crore that year.

Between 2017-18 and 2019-20, the TMC encashed less money through electoral bonds than Congress but every year since then, the TMC has encashed more than double the electoral bonds than Congress. In 2018-19, the TMC received 3.8% of the years encashed bonds compared to Congress’s 15.1% but in 2020-21, the TMC accounted for 12.9% compared to the Congress’s 3.1%. The trend continued in 2021-22 and 2022-23 as well where TMC received 19.8% and 11.6% and the Congress 8.8% ad 6.1%, respectively.

Among regional parties, Odisha’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) received 6.5% of all bonds encashed till March 2023, at ₹774 crore; Tamil Nadu’s DMK, 5.1% at ₹617 crore; and the BRS (TRS) and YSRCP, 3.2% each at ₹384 crore and ₹382 crore respectively.

In the judgement delivered by the Supreme Court on February 15, the apex court ordered the State Bank of India (SBI) to give data of all political donors who purchased electoral bonds to the Election Commission since its interim order of April 12, 2019. The 2019 interim order was delivered in the midst of the sale of electoral bonds between April 1 and April 20. As a result, it is not possible to extract details of electoral bonds purchased and encashed by individual political parties after April 12 from publicly available data.

In response to the question by Congress MP Manish Tewari, the government said that it had paid the State Bank of India ₹8.57 crore from phases I to XXV to issue and redeem bonds. Till date, the government has also paid ₹1.90 crore to Security Printing & Minting Corporation of India Limited (SPMCIL) to print the bonds.

Since the electoral bond scheme was launched in 2018, 674,250 electoral bonds worth ₹28,531.5 crore have been printed by the India Security Press, Nashik. These were printed in three years — 2018, 2019 and 2022 — HT reported on December 28 on the basis of an RTI response received by transparency activist Batra. This means 58% of all electoral bonds printed by the ISP have been sold.

The SBI is the only bank authorised to issue and encash electoral bonds. It does not print the bonds but its authorised branches acquire them from the Centre in different calendar years.