Electoral Bond: Congress Reveals How The Govt Made "Legalisation Of Corruption"
Indian National Congress (INC) today attacked the BJP government over the “legalisation of corruption” through electoral bond. Congress today held a press conference after electoral bond data was released recently by the State Bank of India (SBI) after the Supreme Court admonition to do so. Congress general secretary in charge of communication Jairam Ramesh said his party had taken a consistent stand against the complete anonymity of the Electoral Bond Scheme.
Mr Ramesh highlighted that one of its 2019 Lok Sabha election manifesto promises was to abolish the electoral bond. He alleged that the (SBI)’s attempts to postpone the release of the electoral bond data were done at the behest of Prime Minister Modi and his government. He noted that the process only took three lines of Python code and less than 15 seconds to match the donors with political parties to point out that the claim that the SBI initially made asking deadline extension was “brazen and ridiculous.”
His statement then said that with the release of the electoral bond data, it has become clear why the BJP government feared the information from being revealed. It then said the party had highlighted “four patterns of blatant corruption”n in the Electoral Bonds Scam: Prepaid Bribe, Postpaid Bribe, Extortion / Post-raid Bribe and Shell Companies.
Noting that the government is the one who provides contracts for highways and other infrastructure projects and the government’s use of central agencies such as CBI, IT and ED, the statement said that the matched database of the electoral bond donors and recipients along with the information available to publics such as government contracts, project clearance and raid revealed the “legalisation of corruption.”
“The opaque scheme ensured that prepaid bribes, postpaid bribes and even post-raid bribes could now be routed through the banking channel as electoral bonds. Essentially, this is the Prime Minister who gave a guarantee of ‘bringing back black money’, instead legalized corruption and then desperately trying to hide it,” the statement said.
To illustrate the Prepaid Bribe (Chanda Do, Dhanda Lo), the statement explained that the BJP got Rs. 551 crores as donation in exchange for Rs. 1.32 lakh crores in contract and project approvals that were given by Central or BJP state governments within 3 months after the donation.
And the Postpaid Bribe (Theka Lo, Rishvat Do) worked as Rs. 62,000 crores in contracts and project approvals were given by Central or BJP state governments, for which Rs. 580 crores of Postpaid Bribe in the form of electoral bonds were given to the BJP within 3 months after approval or contract.
The statement then pointed out that the extortion (Hafta Vasooli) was carried out through central agencies’ raids. The statement said that 41 corporate groups faced a total of 56 ED, CBI and IT raids and subsequently gave Rs 2,592 crore to the BJP. Notably, Rs 1,853 crore out of the total amount was given after the raids.
The Congress party further said that a total of 16 shell companies donated 419 crore to the BJP out of 543 crore that companies donated in total. These companies included a watch list for money laundering, firms giving donations within months of formation, and companies donating many multiples of their paid-up share capital.
The statement further asserted that it has collected a completed, verified database of contracts, project clearances, raids by ED, IT and CBI and shell companies, adding that all are carefully matched to the database of BJP’s Electoral Bond donors.
