Senior Congress leader Manish Tewari today raised the electoral bond issue in Lok Sabha during zero hour and alleged that this whole process was channelized under the directions of PMO just before elections.
“I want to draw the attention of the House towards electoral bonds. The electoral bond scheme was limited to elections. RTI in 2018 reveled that government overruled Reserve Bank of India on electoral bonds,” Congress MP Manish Tewari said in the Lower House.
Describing electoral bonds as a "political bribery scheme", the opposition party has alleged that it was a scam that tarnished the image of the Indian democracy and legalise the corruption system. "BJP has legalized the corruption system in the country. It has institutionalized corruption . They want to become a billion dollar party and because of that they organise events like Howdy Modi. Their method is to profit some companies and in return get funds for the party,"said senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal to ABP News.
Rubbishing Congress' claims, the BJP has said the Congress still wants to accumulate funds through black money. "Congress party is mired in corruption since decades. It should realize that the funds are not being given through cash but through bank accounts of donors who have filled their KYC. Congress does not want fair elections and wants to continue accumulating funds through black money", GVL Narasimha Rao told ABP News.
The BJP govt is running 90 per cent of the business in this country with a few industrialists," senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Wednesday.
He alleged that the scheme of electoral bonds resulted in money laundering and destroyed transparency in the funding of political parties.
'Disclose donor information in Parliament'
Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, Ghulam Nabi Azad, along with party colleagues Randeep Singh Surjewala and Anand Sharma, said under the electoral bonds scheme, the donor buying the bonds could hide his identity and at the same time, a political party needed to share the details as regards from whom it got how much money.
"Our demand is that the PM must intervene and the government must disclose full donor information, who donated crores to the BJP coffers, and place this information before Parliament," Sharma said.
Parliament is in session and the government should make the disclosure before both the houses, he added.
Surjewala said, "The electoral bond scheme of the Narendra Modi government is a modus operandi to receive thousands of crores from big business houses through secret donations."
Citing news reports based on RTI documents, he said, "The intrigue and the conspiracy has now indicted the prime minister himself. RTI documents now establish the role and indict none less than the prime minister himself."
"Their promise was to bring black money back from offshore accounts, but reverse if that is happening," Surjewala said.
The grand old party further claimed that the government introduced the scheme by ignoring the objections of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and that it was a way of political extortion of money.
(With additional information from Agencies)