New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received Rs 959 crore as political donations from various electoral trusts in 2024-25, out of which nearly Rs 757 crore, which is 83% of the total donations to the saffron party, came from Tata group-controlled Progressive Electoral Trust (PET).

More interestingly, an investigation by Scroll had recently revealed that the Tata Group donations came weeks after the Narendra Modi-led Union government announced subsidies of over Rs 44,000 crore for two of the conglomerate’s semiconductor manufacturing units – one in Assam and the other in Gujarat – both BJP-ruled states.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has now uploaded documents related to all the donations made through electoral trusts in 2024-25. These papers showed that PET’s donations to the BJP were made in April, 2024, days before the general elections, and weeks after the Union government announced the setting up of three semiconductor units as its push towards building India as a digital manufacturing hub.

In February 2024, the Supreme Court struck down electoral bonds, a new system brought by the Union government for political parties to accept donations, as unconstitutional and non-transparent. However, it appears that the BJP barely felt the heat as it was the largest beneficiary even in the existing system of electoral trusts (ETs) – a more transparent system than bonds to accept political donations. The BJP, EC’s documents had shown, had received a whopping Rs 1,685 crore from bonds in 2023-24 before the instrument was scrapped by the Supreme Court. Even then, the BJP had emerged as the biggest beneficiary of political donations and far outnumbered the principal opposition party the Congress.

Documents uploaded by the EC show that the BJP received a total Rs 959 crore from various electoral trusts in 2024-25. The Tata group-owned PET donated Rs 757.6 crore. The Mahindra group-backed New Democratic ET gave the saffron party Rs 150 crore, whereas the ruling party received Rs 30.1 crore from Harmony ET, Rs 21 crore from Triumph ET, Rs 9.5 lakh from Jan Kalyan and Rs 7.75 lakh from Einzigartik ET, a Times of India report notes.

Also read: Hijacking Elections and Diverting Attention: The BJP’s Playbook in Bihar

PET receives donations from various Tata group companies and disburses them in the Lok Sabha election year. Even in 2018-19, its donations to the BJP was highest among all. It passed on nearly 75% of its total Rs 454 crore corpus in 2018-19 to the BJP that received Rs 356 crore from PET. In comparison, PET donated merely Rs 55.6 crore to the Congress and Rs 43 crore to the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

The biggest donor to political parties for many years has been Prudent ET but its donations in the year 2024-25 have still not been uploaded by the EC, and thus, can’t be assessed. However, earlier documents had shown that Prudent ET had donated Rs 724 crore to the BJP in 2023-24, a majority share of the sum of Rs 856.4 crore that the ruling party received via trusts in 2023-24.

Similarly, the BJP was the biggest beneficiary of Tata-controlled PET by a distance in both 2018-19 and 2024-25.

In comparison, Congress received Rs 77.3 crore from PET in 2024-24, Rs 5 crore from New Democratic ET, Rs 9.5 lakh from Jan Kalyan ET. As per Congress’ own filings, it received Rs 216.33 crore from Prudent ET and Rs 15 crore from A B General ET in 2024-25. Congress also declared in its filings that it received Rs 313 crore of its total of Rs 517 crore contributions through the ET route.

The grand-old party’s contributions in 2024-25 was drastically lesser than the Rs 828 crore it had received through electoral bonds in 2023-24 but bigger than Rs 171 crore in 2022-23, a non-general election year.

TMC, YSR Congress, Shiv Sena, Biju Janata Dal, Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Janata Dal (United), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) also received Rs 10 crore each from PET.

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