'Hard data on BJP’s corruption now available': Congress targets PM Modi over his remarks on electoral bond issue

Tribune News Service

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, April 1

The Congress on Monday said while “corruption” of the Narendra Modi Government has been known for a while now, the “setback” is that there are now hard numbers to prove it.

Responding to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertion that what he had done wrong on the electoral bond front to face a “setback”, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said, “Rs 4 lakh crores worth of contracts, projects, and environmental clearances can be linked to thousands of crores in electoral bond donations made by corporate donors to the BJP.

“The Government of India has been reduced to a supermarket — ‘Chanda Do, Dhanda Lo’,” Ramesh wrote.

“At least 40 ED/IT/CBI raids on firms have been followed by hefty electoral bond donations by these firms to the BJP. The Prime Minister and his cronies have been engaged in a systematic Hafta Vasuli”, the Congress leader alleged.

“Unfortunately, we can expect the Prime Minister to continue his full-time job of lying to the Indian people to cover it”, Ramesh said.

According to Ramesh, the Prime Minister claimed during an interview with a Tamil television channel that the source of funds and how these are being used is known only due to the Electoral Bond Scheme instituted by him.

Stating that the reality is vastly different, Ramesh said the Electoral Bond Scheme was designed to be fully anonymous.

“In other words, Modi wanted to hide from the public the details of where funds have come from [to political parties], and how these funds are being used”, Ramesh said in a statement posted on X.

“For six years, between 2018 and 2024, not a single detail of which party got funds from which donor was revealed to the public”, the Congress general secretary wrote.

In 2024, the Supreme Court intervened to reject the Electoral Bond Scheme as unconstitutional. Up until the last day in court, the Modi Government tried to defend the anonymity of the scheme, Ramesh wrote.

When the Supreme Court demanded that the SBI publish the details of who donated to which party, “the remote-controlled SBI” lied to the court, saying it did not collect this information, Ramesh wrote.

The SBI then requested three months’ time to collate the data, conveniently seeking an extension until after the election, Ramesh wrote saying it was only the Supreme Court’s strong intervention that forced the SBI to release the data publicly within days

“The SBI was lying in the Supreme Court when it demanded a 3-month extension to match donor data with the political parties. It took our team five lines of Python code and less than fifteen seconds to match each donor with the political party they donated to”, Ramesh said.

Ramesh said the data has revealed monumental corruption by the BJP and the Modi Government.

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