New Delhi: Did the Bharatiya Rashtra Samiti of K. Chandrasekhar Rao prevail upon the Telangana-based company Megha Engineering to make large donations in the form of electoral bonds to the Karnataka-based political party Janata Dal (Secular)?
The question is bound to be asked given the JD(S)’s own disclosures about the identity of the companies whose electoral bonds it received and encashed. The JD(S), which is now an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, fought the 2023 assembly elections in Karnataka against both the BJP and the Congress but came third with a paltry 19 seats, down from 37 in 2018.
On Sunday, the Election Commission of India (ECI) made public the information that all registered political parties gave it last year in sealed covers about the electoral bonds they had received since 2019.
While the largest recipients of electoral bond donations nationally only gave the EC a date wise list of the bonds they had encashed, the JD(S) was among four regional parties which went ahead and identified their donors as well. The other parties which chose to be transparent were the AIADMK and DMK from Tamil Nadu and the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir.
MEIL Biggest Donor to JD(S)
Of the total of Rs 89.75 crore the party received in the form of bonds, a large chunk – or Rs 40 crore – intriguingly, came from the Hyderabad-based Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Limited (MEIL). Karnataka has no dearth of infrastructure companies, but for a regional party based in Karnataka to draw such volumes from a Hyderabad-based infra major is interesting. Megha, incidentally, is among the top two purchasers of electoral bonds, nationally. The company bought bonds worth Rs 966 crore between 2019 and 2023. In August 2018, MEIL got into the business of TV news. It now owns a major stake in the TV9 network.
Another Hyderabad-based infrastructure company, Megha Engineering and Constructions Pvt Ltd, gave Rs 10 crore to Janata Dal (S) in 2019, according to the party’s declaration. That company’s bond purchase, being before April 12, 2019, is not recorded in the data made public by SBI, as that is the cut-off start date for the bank’s disclosures. Rs 40 crore, from MEIL, came on April 18, 2023, bang in the middle of the camping for the Karnataka assembly elections. On April 21, the ruling party in Telangana at the time – K. Chandrashekar Rao’s BRS – publicly declared it would be supporting JD(S) in Karnataka polls and said it would not field any candidate in the neighbouring state. Congress eventually won the election, trumping BJP and JD(S). JD(S), led by former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, has since decided to align with the Modi camp and is now part of the NDA. It is expected to fight two parliamentary seats.
JD(S)’s declaration also reveals that the party encashed Rs 1 crore from what it lists as ‘Bicon Limited’. No entity with that name can be found in the list of bond-purchasing corporates put out by State Bank of India last week.
The party has also received money from Infosys, the Embassy Group of Companies, Health Care Global Enterprises Private Limited, Shahi Exports Pvt. Ltd., Shankaranarayana Constructions (P) Ltd., JSW Steel Ltd., Amar Raj Groups and the Aditya Birla Group.
2018
In 2018, JD(S) got most of its electoral bond money from the Embassy Group of Companies Pvt. Ltd. – Rs 22 crore in all. The Embassy Group, with its registered office in Bengaluru, was founded in 1993 and calls itself “one of India’s largest real estate conglomerates with a broad portfolio of over 66 million sq. ft. of prime commercial, residential, retail, hospitality, services, and educational spaces across Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Noida and Trivandrum in the Indian market and Serbia and Malaysia in the international market.”
On April 17, 2018, JD(S) also encashed a bond from Health Care Global Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., for Rs 25 lakh. The month after, on May 14, 2018, it says Bicon Limited enabled it to encash a bond of Rs 50 Lakh. On March 20, 2018, the party also got a bond encashed, originating from Infosys Technologies Ltd for Rs 1 crore.
H.D, Kumaraswamy served as the chief minister of the state for 14 months in alliance with the Congress after the 2018 assembly polls. The BJP toppled the state government one year after winning the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
In at least four cases, entities named by the JD(S) as corporate bond donors cannot be matched with donors who have electoral bonds, as per data put out by the SBI last week.
General Elections 2019
In 2019, just before and during the last general elections, JD(S) managed to encash Rs 25 crore in all. It was holding office, in a coalition with the Congress at this time.
On January 9, 2019, the party encashed a bond from Shahi Exports Pvt. Ltd. worth Rs 1.5 crore. From Megha Engineering and Constructions Pvt. Ltd. it encashed its bond of Rs 10 crore. The general elections were held that year. On March 20, 2019, JD(S) says it got Rs 5 crore from Shankaranarayana Constructions (P) Ltd. On looking at the SBI bond purchasers’ data, Shankaranarayana shows up as having bought only five bonds of Rs 1 crore each but on April 15, 2019. JD(S) says it got funds a month earlier. This may be due to details of bonds purchased before April 12, 2019 not being in the public domain.
On the same day, Bicon Limited features again in the information provided by the party, with Rs 1 crore. On April 6, 2019 when the general elections were on, the JD (S) encashed bonds from JSW Steel Ltd. worth Rs 3.5 crore, then four days later, on April 10, of Rs 1 crore and then on April 11, of Rs 50 lakhs, all from JSW Steel. On April 15, 2019, it says that from the Amar Raj Group it got two bonds of Rs 1 crore each and from the Aditya Birla Group it received Rs 50 lakh. None of these transactions named above, show up in the SBI-provided data of those who have bought bonds, presumably because the SBI has not released details of bonds sold prior to April 2019.
JD(S) has had a particularly volatile political record, coinciding with the time that electoral bonds were introduced. It started as a ‘third front’ party, then formed an alliance with the Congress, then was with the BRS in the last assembly polls and is now with the BJP.
Note: This article was edited on March 19, 2024 to reflect that Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Limited and Megha Engineering and Constructions Pvt Ltd are two separate entities.
