Reportage on a planet without equitable or sustainable development.
The Rs 60,000 Crore Question the BJP Needs to Answer About its Financials
A paradox has gone unexamined for too long. All around us are signs of the BJP’s extraordinary wealth. The party outspends its rivals in polls and erecting party offices on prime real estate, to take just two instances. That is just visible expenditure. The party also faces charges of luring rival politicians with loads of cash to topple state governments. At the same time, however, its audited annual reports to the Election Commission report modest numbers. Like the line goes in Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America”, while lustily penning books about the magnificence of the BJP’s election winning machine, India’s commentariat has “maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity” on the party’s financial flows. It’s an odd — and wilful — miss. Political parties cannot be understood through their ideology alone. Money-flows are central as well to their functioning. Often, as we see, they displace ideology to become the driving force. The converse is far rarer. And so, the question: how deep do the BJP’s cash reserves run? In this report, I use back of the envelope calculations to hazard some guesses. Large questions lie here: Where did this money come from? What does it portend when a political party gets much richer than the people it purports to serve? This is what we are seeing in Russia — the great gains in Putin’s wealth even as ordinary Russians sink.
PS: This article has also been translated into hindi — by The Wire Hindi and by a newspaper in Rajasthan called Kalwad Times.
I am an Indian journalist with interests in energy, environment, climate and India’s ongoing slide into right-wing authoritarianism. My book, Despite the State, an examination of pervasive state failure and democratic decay in India, was published by Westland Publications, India, in January 2021. My work has won the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award; the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award; five Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism; and, more recently, been a finalist at the True Story Award and GIJN’s Global Shining Light Awards. Write to me at despitethestate@protonmail.com.
“Westland closure: Titles that are selling fast and a few personal recommendations,” by Chetana Divya Vasudev, Moneycontrol. (Because this happened too. In February, a year after DtS was released, Amazon decided to shutter Westland, which published the book. The announcement saw folks rushing to buy copies of Westland books before stocks run out.)
Fractured/Earth 
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