JANA SENA ONLY UNRECOGNISED PARTY TO RECEIVE ELECTORAL BONDS
With national and large regional parties receiving the bulk of donations through electoral bonds, smaller and unrecognised political parties largely responded with a ‘nil’ donation to election commission queries seeking information.
The communications were disclosed in full on Sunday. The analysis relies on these communications, along with earlier disclosures accessible in the public domain. A single party’s donations have resulted in an uptick in donations to unrecognised parties. These are parties that do not have a reserved symbol because they are new or have not garnered sufficient votes in previous contests. They received zero contributions between 2019 and 2021, compared to thousands of crores received by state and national parties.
This changed to ~2 crore in 2022. Another ~2 crore was received in 2023. The uptick in 2024 took it to ~21 crore. All the donations went to a single party.
The Jana Sena Party, founded by Pawan Kalyan, is headquartered in Telangana, and it accounts for all of the donations received by the ‘unrecognised’ party segment.
An analysis of financial data available from tracker myneta.info shows that the party’s assets grew from ~0.003 crore in 2014-15 to ~14.36 crore in 2019-20. The party was founded by Telugu actor Pawan Kalyan in 2014. It is in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP).
The share of unrecognised parties in the overall electoral bonds segment, based on data disclosed so far by the election commission remains small. It accounts for ~21 crore or just 0.2 per cent of the total donations that parties garnered which was ~12,769 crore.