Electoral Bonds are an ‘Extortion Scheme’ Says Rahul Gandhi; Ambedkar’s Fears About Communalisation Are Coming True

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK 

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Snapshot of the day

April 17, 2024

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Union government incurred a bill of nearly Rs 14 crore – to be paid with taxpayer money – on printing and managing the now-unconstitutional electoral bonds, an RTI response to retired Commodore and transparency activist Lokesh Batra has revealed. The cost of printing and managing these bonds is not borne by the donors or recipients, but by the government and, by extension, taxpayers.

Electoral bonds were the “biggest extortion scheme in the world”, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday, questioning Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim in a recent interview that the now-scrapped mechanism was introduced by his government to improve transparency in political funding. “A few days ago, the prime minister gave a very long interview to [news agency] ANI,” Gandhi said at a press conference. “It was scripted, but it was a flop show.” “The prime minister says that the system of electoral bonds was brought for transparency, to clean politics,” he said. “If this is true then why was that system cancelled by the Supreme Court?”

Here’s Prime Minister Modi’s guarantee to the nation.