POLITICAL FUNDING IN INDIA remains a grey area, characterized by massive amounts of money being funneled into political parties’ bank accounts without any transparency or disclosure of financial statements. With the absence of sincere electoral reforms in India that can provide any legal or constitutional framework to monitor these political funds, political parties can accumulate vast amounts of money without anyone questioning them. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) official bank account statement for the year ending March 2025 shows something surprising: the party is earning huge amounts of money from bank interests alone, on top of the donations it collects. These numbers have brought back an old question — how fair and transparent is political funding in India? 

What the BJP's Financial Filing Shows

The BJP's financial records filed with the Election Commission were shared by Chartered Accountant Tushar Chhabra on his Instagram account @the.consistent.kid. In the party's “Income & Expenditure Account,” the income section lists that the party earned ₹5.70 crore from fees and membership, and ₹6,124.86 crore from donations (listed as “voluntary contributions” in the statement). Additionally, the figure indicated against “Interest from Banks” was worth ₹634.10 crore, meaning the BJP earned a huge sum of money simply from interest on the funds sitting in its bank account.

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Adding ₹4.49 crore acquired from “other income,” the party's total income for the year comes to ₹6,769.15 crore. So out of everything the BJP earned that year, bank interest alone made up close to one-tenth of its total income — money that came in simply because the party has so much cash sitting in the bank, not from any donation or political work.

The “Notes to Accounts” part of the same filing shows where all that money is actually kept. As of March 31, 2025, the party had ₹73.68 crore in cash on hand and ₹531.83 crore in regular bank accounts. But most of its money — ₹7,073.87 crore in fixed deposits set to mature in under a year, plus another ₹2,316.74 crore in fixed deposits maturing after a year — was locked away earning interest. In total, the party's cash and bank balances added up to ₹9,996.12 crore, just short of ₹10,000 crore. It's this large pile of fixed deposits that quietly earns the ₹634 crore a year as interest.

What Political Commentator Munish Kumar Raizada Says 

Talking about these numbers, political commentator Munish Kumar Raizada said India's political funding system is a “grey zone” — there's no real transparency, and it stays deliberately unclear. He said political parties have become extremely rich by accumulating massive amounts of wealth. This huge amount of money “makes the hare go” — meaning political parties and their leaders just do anything to their liking. 

He also brought up the electoral bonds scheme — financial instruments used to make anonymous donations to political parties. This scheme allowed individuals and companies to buy bonds from the State Bank of India and give them to political groups without public disclosure. The electoral bonds supposedly kept the identity of the donors hidden, and were introduced to supposedly stop the use of illegal “black money” in elections and move political funding into formal banking channels.

However, critics argued that this encased the political funding process in even more doubts, as one couldn't ascertain who donated how much money. In 2024, the Supreme Court of India declared the electoral bond system unconstitutional, ruling that complete donor anonymity violated the right to information and free elections. Raizada termed it as a “late but necessary decision.”

See also: BJP’s Donations Surge to Over ₹6,000 Crore After Electoral Bonds Scrapped—85% of Total Political Donations in 2024-25

Raizada’s biggest worry was about what this political funding does during elections — he said unaccounted “dark money” is often used to buy off voters with freebies or other endowments. Politicians also dabble in “horse-trading” — shady monetary deals conducted between parties and leaders to buy out lawmakers or to coerce political leaders to switch sides.

The political commentator further highlighted the “wealth spectacle” that we witness during election season — political parties conducting huge, elaborate rallies and spending thousands upon thousands of rupees in advertising themselves and increasing their visibility.

Raizada was direct in saying that Parliament doesn't seem interested in fixing this, and instead spends its time on symbolic debates rather than real reform — which is why, in his words, it's fair to call today's system a kind of closed “party-cracy” — wherein the entire nation’s systems and its democracy function as per political parties’ whims.

Commenting upon the current state of Indian democracy, Raizada remarked that parliamentarians too don't care about improving the state of electoral reforms in the nation — but instead spend the parliament’s crucial time and money on debating Vande Mataram.

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