Two months before the Lok Sabha elections were held in 2024, anonymous electoral bonds were struck down and details made public by the Supreme Court in February and March.
The disclosures revealed that the largest beneficiary of electoral bonds – opaque monetary instruments that allowed corporations and individuals to donate money to parties anonymously – was the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The biggest contributor to the BJP’s kitty between April 2019 and January 2024 was the Hyderabad-based Megha group of companies, which gave Rs 664 crore to the party through electoral bonds.
A year later, fresh income disclosures by the BJP for 2023-’24 show Megha remained its largest single donor for the year, donating Rs 350 crore to the party through bonds. The bonds were purchased before the Supreme Court’s February verdict after which no further sale of bonds took place.
The new data released in January 2025 reveals much continuity in the way India’s ruling party gets its finances – but there is also some change. Here are three trends visible in the data.
The BJP continued to get the lion’s share of all political finance in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.
As Scroll had reported last year, between 2019 and 2023, the BJP received Rs 8,252 crore through electoral bonds – just over 50% of the total Rs 16,492 crore donated to all registered political parties through bonds. This meant one party alone received more money from bonds than more than 20 others put together.
In 2023-’24, the BJP’s share of electoral bond donations declined to 37%. The party received nearly Rs 1,686 crore of the total Rs 4,508 crore donated through bonds.
Electoral bonds, however, are only one of the routes through which political parties received money. The other sources are direct donations from individuals and corporations, and donations routed through electoral trusts.
Including all such known sources, the BJP received Rs 3,967 crore in 2023-’24 – a jump of 87% from its income in 2022-’23.
More significantly, this means the BJP cornered 55% of all donations made to the 37 political parties that have filed their audit reports with the Election Commission – a number that is roughly consistent with the trend seen in previous years.
The share of electoral bonds in the BJP’s income dropped sharply in 2023-’24.
While the BJP’s income surged ahead of the 2024 election, the Supreme Court’s February verdict ensured that electoral bonds contributed less to its income than direct donations.
Barring the pandemic year of 2020-’21, electoral bonds had been the biggest source of political finance for the BJP since 2018, the year the bonds were first issued. In 2022-’23, for instance, the party received 61% of its income from the opaque instruments. In 2023-’24, the share fell to 42%.
Concurrently, the share of direct donations from electoral trusts rose from 12% in 2022-’23 to 21% in 2023-’24.
In absolute amounts, the BJP received Rs 1,686 crore through electoral bonds in 2023-’24. The remaining Rs 2,282 crore came in as direct contributions from individuals, corporations and electoral trusts.
A familiar set of companies remained the top donors of the BJP.
Identifying the top donors of the BJP for 2023-’24 is tricky since a large chunk of money came from electoral trusts.
Electoral trusts act as intermediaries, taking donations from individuals and corporations which are redirected to political parties. However, since no disclosure is made about which donor paid whom, the process obscures the exact amount handed by a firm to a party.
About 18% of BJP’s total income in 2023-’24 – nearly Rs 724 crore – came from the Delhi-based Prudent electoral trust. This constituted 67% of all the donations made by the trust. This is not unusual – roughly 75% of Prudent’s donations since 2014 have gone to the BJP. However, what is notable is that the size of the trust’s contribution to the party in 2023-’24 was more than double the amount seen in any previous year.
While it is not possible to trace the exact amount that the BJP received from each of the firms that made donations to Prudent, since no single donor contributed more than Rs 100 crore to the trust, the BJP’s income from any single donor could not have exceeded Rs 100 crore.
Combining the data for Prudent with data on the donors who contributed money to the BJP through electoral bonds and by making direct donations, we found that the single largest donor to the BJP in 2023-’24 was Hyderabad-based Megha Engineering and Infrastructures Limited. Bharti Airtel came second at Rs 150 crore.
Megha Engineering also donated Rs 50 crore to the Prudent electoral trust in 2023-’24, and Bharti Airtel donated Rs 29 crore. If this money was eventually routed to the BJP, it would further raise the contribution made by these firms to the ruling party’s kitty.
The other big donors of the BJP include the Chennai-based Murugappa group, which donated Rs 127.5 crore to the BJP via the Triumph electoral trust. (Since the group is the sole donor to the trust, it is possible to trace the money to the ultimate beneficiary.)
The Jharkhand-based mining giant, Rungta group, donated Rs 100 crore to the BJP in 2023-’24 – Rs 50 crore in direct donations and Rs 50 crore through electoral bonds.
Firms and executives linked to the Reliance group, Qwik Supply Chain Private Limited, K Ramachandran Raja and Laxmidas Vallabhdas Merchant, also donated Rs 100 crore to the BJP, all through electoral bonds, in November 2023.
In the same month, three firms of the Aditya Birla group, Birla Carbon India Private Limited, Ultra Tech Cement Limited and Utkal Alumina International Private Limited, also donated Rs 100 crore to the party via electoral bonds.
Close on their heels are two infrastructure firms from Ahmedabad, which donated directly and through electoral bonds: The HN Safal group with Rs 75 crore and the Dineshchandra R Agrawal Infracon with Rs 65 crore.
