Electoral Bond: Congress walks Obama path with crowdsourcing

By Manish Anand

New Delhi, December 25: The Supreme Court has reserved its verdict on the Constitutional validity of the electoral bonds. The petitioners challenging the electoral bonds have claimed that the tool introduced in 2017 to clean up funding of elections is essentially bribery to destroy democracy in India. The experts are keenly awaiting the apex court verdict, likely early next month. The Bharatiya Janata Party pocketed a whopping 57 per cent of the funds routed through the bonds in five years after the launch of the scheme.

Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan had been arguing that electoral bonds are non-transparent. Several economic commentators have been arguing that electoral bonds are biased in favour of the ruling party at the Centre while being instruments of indirect bribery.

The Congress has launched the crowdfunding in the denomination of Rs 138 after the party could get just about Rs 952 crores in the last five year since the launch of the scheme while the BJP got over Rs 5270 crores in the same period. The online campaign has so far collected over Rs five crores.

Ajay Maken who heads the Congress’ crowd-sourcing drive posted on social media platform X: “The Indian National Congress is proud to announce the launch of its online crowdfunding campaign, ‘Donate for Desh’. This initiative is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi ji’s historic ‘Tilak Swaraj Fund’ in 1920-21 and aims to empower our party in creating an India rich in equal resource distribution and opportunities. Our inaugural campaign, ‘Donate for Behtar Bharat’, commemorates the 138-year journey of the Indian National Congress.”

The political observers are claiming that the Congress under the leadership of party president Mallikarjuna Kharge has taken a leaf out of the book of former President of the US Barack Obama. Incidentally, Obama had launched a successful crowdsourcing of funds for the presidential elections in the US.

Economic journalist T K Arun, while writing for Impact and Policy Research Institute, stated: “Electoral bonds are a double fraud on the people. The apparent fraud is that it conceals from the public who funds a particular party, essential for clarity on whether a particular policy owes its specific tonal modulation to the old rule that who pays the piper calls the tune”. He further argued that “the less apparent fraud is the implicit suggestion that political funding has now been cleaned up, except for that element of anonymity, as the contributions made through electoral bonds go through banking channels and do not involve hoards of black money. This, of course, distracts attention from the ongoing funding off the books, making finance activity too dirty to be accounted for.”

Arun’s arguments are in line with comments made by Rajan in the recent months against the electoral bonds. The Congress’ crowdsourcing campaign will be concluding on December 28. The party is reaching out to at least ten houses in every booth for contributions of at least Rs 138 from each house.

The Kharge model to go to the people directly for funds also aims to revitalize the party’s organizational strength at the grassroots to connect with the people. The campaign on the first day had garnered a collections of just over Rs one crores. The campaign of the Congress is not seen as a runaway success in terms of collections of funds but the party appears bracing up for a long journey to build a counter narrative against electoral bonds.

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