New Delhi: Rajasthan-based Shree Cement Limited and telecom giant Bharti Airtel’s donations to the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)) through electoral bonds coincided with the 2019 Bihar Lok Sabha elections.
In the party’s submission to the Election Commission of India (ECI), the JD(U) declared that it received Rs 13 crore through electoral bonds between April 10, 2019 and April 26, 2019, but could name only two of its donors, namely Shree Cement and Bharti Airtel.
These details were submitted to the ECI, which later shared it with the Supreme Court and published it on March 17, 2024.
The 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Bihar were carried out in seven phases between April 11 and May 19.
The JD(U) contested the elections as part of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2019 and had switched to the opposition in 2022, only to go back to the NDA fold in early 2024.
While Shree Cement Ltd donated Rs 2 crore through two electoral bonds, Bharti Airtel gave Rs 1 crore to the party.
Interestingly, the donors of the remaining Rs 10 crore received by the party have not been named, with the JD(U) claiming it wasn’t aware of who donated those electoral bonds.
“Somebody came to our office on 03.04.2019 at Patna and handed over a sealed envelope and when it was opened we found a bunch containing ten electoral bonds of rupees one crore each,” the party told the ECI.
“Accordingly, as per gazette notification of the Govt of India, we opened an account in SBI Main Branch, Patna and deposited it which was credited to our party account on 10.04.2019.”
Founded in 1979, Shree Cement Ltd is the manufacturer of top cement brand Bangur.
ZaubaCorp lists the names of its eight directors as Shreekant Somany, Sanjiv Shelgikar, Zubair Ahmed, Hari Mohan Bangur, Uma Ghurka, Prashant Bangur, Nitin Desai and Neeraj Akhoury.
The ECI data that published a list of donors from April 12, 2019 to January 11, 2024 last week reveals that Shree Cements also bought electoral bonds worth Rs 10.5 crore in three tranches – Rs 4.5 crore on May 8, 2019; Rs 4 crore on January 21, 2020; and then Rs 2 crore on October 21, 2020.
The company’s donations to the JD(U) preceded these purchases, which means that subsequent donations by Shree Cements could have gone to other parties, too.
It has already been revealed that Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel is one of the top ten donors to political parties.
Electoral bond donations to Nitish’s JD(U) stopped coming in after he left the BJP-led NDA in 2022. Photo: PMO.
Between 2019 and 2024, the telecom company donated Rs 247 crore to mostly the BJP-led NDA parties through electoral bonds.
It is important to note that the submissions of the political parties to the ECI are different from the larger list of donors that the ECI published last week.
While the submissions reveal the donations received by parties from electoral bonds purchased until April 11, 2019, the larger list contains the electoral bonds purchased from April 12, 2019 to January 11, 2024.
Apart from what it declared in its submission, the longer list of subsequent donations shows that the JD(U) also received another Rs 14 crore through electoral bonds between April 16, 2019 and January 20, 2022 (Rs 2 crore on April 16, 2019; Rs 1 crore on April 26, 2019; Rs 1 crore on October 31, 2020; and then Rs 10 crore on January 20, 2022).
After the JD(U) received its first electoral bonds during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, it received its next batch of donations through bonds in October 2020, which also coincided with the Bihar assembly elections when the party and the BJP fought together in an alliance.
Interestingly, its biggest and the last batch of donations (Rs 10 crore) came in January 2022, when Nitish was still a part of the NDA.
However, donations to the JD(U) stopped coming when he switched camps and joined the opposition alliance in August 2022.
