Who’s Paying the Price? Inside BJP’s Record-Breaking Election Spending in 2024
BJP's election spending gap with Congress widenened in 2024, raising transparency concerns.
By: HIMANSHI DAHIYA
In August 2018, at an all-party meeting called by the Election Commission of India (ECI), the proposal to cap election spending by political parties was on the table. Most political parties, except the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed for a cap on spending.
Unsurprisingly, in the 2019 General Election held nine months later, the BJP spent Rs 1264 crore, a staggering Rs 444 crore more than the Congress, which spent Rs 820 crore on the election.
Five years on, in 2024, as India witnessed one of its most expensive elections ever, the BJP's expenditure rose to ₹1,737.68 crore, while that of the Congress shrank to ₹686.19 crore — widening the overall gap to ₹1,048.49 crore.
This means the gap widened by a massive Rs 604 crore in just five years — an increase of 136.04 percent.
The Quint analysed 2024 Lok Sabha election expenditure reports furnished by the BJP and Congress (top two spenders) and found that not only are the Indian elections increasingly becoming an uneven playing field with the BJP outspending most other parties by as much as 50 percent in some cases, the reports submitted to the ECI are also riddled with discrepancies hinting at under reporting of actual expenditure.
We also looked at the spending by both parties on general party propaganda and media, and found that while the Congress still relied on the mainstream media for election advertisements, the BJP spent heavily on PR and communication firms, party mouthpieces, and tech giants such as Facebook and Google.
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