On March 30, days after the Election Commission of India lifted the veil of secrecy over the donors and beneficiaries of electoral bonds worth Rs 16,492 crore, a former software engineer-turned-activist in Bengaluru filed a complaint with the police.

In his complaint, Adarsh Iyer, 50, claimed that Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, along with Bharatiya Janata Party leaders in Karnataka, Nalin Kumar Kateel and BY Vijayendra, had used investigative agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate to extort crores of rupees for the party through the electoral bond scheme.

The BJP is the largest beneficiary of the scheme, which allowed individuals and companies to make donations to political parties anonymously. In the six years till the scheme was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, the BJP pocketed Rs 8,252 crore – more than all other 30 registered parties put together.

According to Iyer, the reason why the BJP was able to extract more donations than other parties was because it had central agencies at its disposal to threaten and extort money from businesses.

“My associates and I filed 15 complaints with the Thilaknagar police station after the electoral bonds data was declared,” Iyer told Scroll. None of them resulted in any first information reports, the police document that sets the criminal justice system in motion. “So we moved court on April 15,” he said. “We strategically chose to go ahead with just one complaint because it is the most important one.”

After six months, the court directed the police to register a case against Sitharaman and others.

This has given rise to FIR number 0224 of 2024, in which Sitharaman is the first accused, followed by Kateel, Vijayendra, and unidentified BJP functionaries and Enforcement Directorate officials. They have been booked for extortion and criminal conspiracy.

The BJP said that the FIR was an attempt by the Congress to divert attention from a land scam involving chief minister Siddaramahiah.

On September 30, the Karnataka High Court put an interim stay on the FIR till the next hearing on October 22.

Equal opportunity offender

An activist lodging an FIR against a union minister is no mean feat. And Iyer, a former software engineer who switched to activism more than a decade ago, is an equal opportunity offender.

In 2015, he and other activists took on the Congress government under Chief Minister Siddaramaiah after exposing an extortion racket at the office of the Karnataka Lokayukta. Iyer said that he has also brought scrutiny over Janata Dal (Secular) politicians for land grabbing, sued the state’s former education minister for conducting school examinations during Covid, and pursued public interest litigation against errant senior police officials.

Nearly two decades ago, Iyer was a software engineer working in the United States. The 2003 Hollywood movie, Tears of the Sun, starring Bruce Willis, and 2004 Bollywood classic, Swades, starring Shah Rukh Khan, made him reconsider his choices.

“There’s a line in Tears of the Sun: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’” said Iyer. “It changed my outlook.”

In 2005, he quit his job and returned to India. He participated in the Anna Hazare-led India Against Corruption movement against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, enrolled in a law course and even joined the Aam Aadmi Party in 2014, before falling out with its Karnataka unit in 2015.

That year, he and his associates founded the Janaadhikaara Sangharsha Parishath, a collective that works on citizens’ rights. The Parishath is assisted by pro bono lawyers and sustained by a cost-efficient model, said Iyer.

The case against the finance minister

Iyer’s case against Sitharaman deals with two specific cases. He has alleged that the union finance minister directed the Enforcement Directorate – which comes under the Union Finance Ministry – to raid corporate groups such as the mining giant Vedanta group and multinational pharmaceutical firm Aurobindo Pharma. In turn, the companies bought electoral bonds worth hundreds of crores and donated them to the BJP, which then encashed them.

“It fulfills the key elements of extortion under law,” said Iyer. “Creating fear and inducement using ED, and then receiving valuable security like the electoral bonds in return.”

In his petition before a Bengaluru court, Iyer has attached news reports on Enforcement Directorate raids on unidentified firms in Tamil Nadu in August 2022 after allegations that an executive from a Vedanta group firm had bribed Congress member of parliament Karti Chidambaram to expedite the opening of a power plant in Punjab.

The activist has also attached details of electoral bonds worth Rs 230 crore donated by the Vedanta group to the BJP between April 2019 and November 2023. Of this, Rs 100 crore was donated in November 2022 alone. While Iyer connects the August raid to the November donation, what about the donations before and after November 2022?

“That is the gap that the police investigation has to fill,” said Iyer. “Our case is based on a factual study of the electoral bonds that was done in a short time. Our complaint shows that there is definitely a prima facie case against the accused.”

The second case is of Aurobindo Pharma. Iyer has argued that the Enforcement Directorate raids on the pharmaceutical firm in September 2022 and the arrest of its executives in November 2022 was a “conspiracy secretly meted” by Sitharaman and BJP functionaries. They not only “extorted” Rs 49.5 crore through electoral bonds for the BJP but also had Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal arrested in March 2024, he alleged.

Earlier this year, a consortium of newsrooms including Scroll investigating the electoral bonds scheme had reported how P Sarath Chandra Reddy, a director at Aurobindo Pharma and an accused in the Delhi liquor policy case, had donated Rs 5 crore to the BJP days after he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in November 2022. Reddy turned approver in the case in June 2023 and donated another Rs 25 crore to the party in November 2023.

Iyer told Scroll that his and his associates' activism in this case is driven by principle. “The rule of law applies to everyone, citizens and politicians alike,” he said. “The two don’t have different standards. That’s the message we want to send. We want to uphold the constitution.”

So far, he said he has not faced any threats and intimidation for lodging the FIR against Sitharaman. “We have been doing this for ten years now,” he said. “If you are legally strong and on the right side of the law, no one can touch you.”

But Iyer is not taking any chances. He is convinced that the central government will try to have the FIR quashed, and has been working with his lawyer to deal with such a situation. “This has now become a very serious case,” he said.