Skip to main content

Corruption and BJP




The Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] came to power at the Centre in 2014 mainly because of its promise to provide corruption-free governance.  The Congress Party had not only become corrupt but also inefficient so much as to merit a special mention in BJP’s election manifesto 2014: “Corruption is a manifestation of poor Governance.  Moreover, it reflects the bad intentions of those sitting in power.  All-pervasive corruption under the Congress-led UPA has become a ‘National Crisis’.”

Manifesto 2014
The party that came to power on the promise of providing clean governance became the most corrupt party in two years’ time.  What’s more alarming is that BJP’s corruption is not confined to money matters alone; it has corrupted the whole atmosphere of the country polluting it with the vicious hatred of communalism.

Association for Democratic Reforms [ADR] found that the BJP amassed a lot of wealth in various ways soon after it came to power at the Centre in 2014. The ADR report says:

·         Between FY 2014-15 and FY 2015-16, the income of BJP increased by 44.02 percent (Rs 296.62 crore), BSP increased by 67.31 percent (Rs 45.04 crore), NCP increased by 22.05 percent while that of the CPM increased by 1.68 percent (Rs 2.05 crore). The Congress’s income decreased by 0.79 percent (Rs 4.74 crore). CPI’s also decreased by 24.28 percent (Rs 59 lakh).
·         The BJP declared the maximum income from donations which amounted to Rs 940.39 crore.
·         A comparison of total donations declared by the parties in their IT returns (both above and below Rs 20,000) and that declared in the donation report shows that only 49 percent of the total donations of political parties came from voluntary contributions above Rs 20,000. A total of Rs 648.66 crore (51 percent of the total donations) donated to national parties was from donors whose details are not available in the public domain. Total income of political parties from unknown sources is Rs 1,130.59 crore.
·         The BJP had collected Rs 434.67 crore from donors whose details are unavailable.
  • The maximum expenditure for the Congress has been towards election expenditure, BJP’s towards advertisements and publicity followed by travelling.
In addition to such accounts of corruption are the various cases of malpractices that were reported against the party in the last three years.  Many leaders were caught with huge amounts of black money soon after the notorious demonetisation.  Many were caught indulging in scams involving enormous amounts the latest being the case against R S Vinod of Kerala who was accused of taking ₹5.6 crore from a private medical college which paid the bribe for securing an approval from the Medical Council of India.  What is more interesting in this case is that a BJP leader took such a bribe in a state where the BJP does not have any political power.

The moral corruption that has gripped India like a deadly cancer is much more lethal.  The party is spending huge sums of money to spread malicious and false information on various social networks and the media in general.  Machiavellian strategies are being employed to plant ‘stories’ created by the party in newspapers and TV news channels. 

The country is being divided into Hindu versus non-Hindu.  Fortunately, there are still a sizeable section of the Hindu population that has not fallen prey to the propaganda.  That may be the only reason why there is some semblance of democracy still left in the country.  But how long will that last?  It is a question worth raising.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...