Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that electoral bonds were part of the biggest extortion racket in the world, a day after data pertaining to the now-scrapped scheme was made public following Supreme Court directions.
"Electoral bonds were the biggest extortion racket in the world. Funds for splitting political parties and toppling opposition governments came from electoral bonds," Rahul Gandhi said at a rally in Thane.
Corporate donations worth thousands of crores to political parties through now-scrapped electoral bonds have hit the headlines, with Congress demanding a high-level probe by the Supreme Court against the BJP's bank accounts, as it claimed the party got 50 per cent of the money received through these bonds.
Congress has further alleged a nexus between the funding to the BJP bank accounts and central probe and premier agencies' actions against the entities which issued remittances to the BJP accounts via electoral bonds.
"There was no correlation between the electoral bonds and the contracts given by Congress or other opposition parties' governments in states," said Rahul Gandhi, whose Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra is in Maharashtra in its last leg.
Meanwhile, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge alleged that those who faced central agencies' heat and raids have gone to the BJP and got (party) posts there. Kharge also said the data released by the State Bank of India shows that the BJP got nearly 50 per cent of donations through the electoral bonds scheme while the Congress got only 11 per cent.
He also said it was "worrying" that no action has been taken against the BJP while the Congress's bank accounts have been frozen. He said nearly Rs 300 crore is frozen and asked how the party will face the elections.
Amid speculations, the Supreme Court on Friday came down heavily on the State Bank of India (SBI) for not disclosing electoral bond numbers and thereby not fully complying with its previous order. The top court, while noting that details shared by the SBI were non-compliant and incomplete, ruled that electoral bond numbers, which link donors to recipients, "have to be disclosed" by the lender.
