It's great to have you here for this week's Politics to Policy edition. Today, we're going to tackle three separate threads: trust donation architecture, the official-versus-actual spending gap, and criminal candidates as a funding response in Indian elections. So let’s get right to it.

There is a detail in the 2024-25 political funding data. Tata Sons, through its Progressive Electoral Trust, donated Rs 757.6 crore to the ruling party. The Scroll reported that this came weeks after the Union Cabinet cleared semiconductor manufacturing projects for the Tata Group, carrying subsidies worth Rs 44,203 crore. The donation is documented. The subsidy decision is documented. The sequence is the evidence.

More than the evidence, this sequence is the operating logic of Indian corporate political funding. Money arrives before contracts are awarded, or after them, or both. The channel keeps changing. The exchange remains the same.

In February 2024, the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional. The judgment held that anonymous corporate donations to political parties violated the public's right to know. The court was right, and the scheme was gone.

One year later, corporate donations to one political party had more than doubled.

This is the consistent pattern in India's political funding history. Every institutional reform produces the next institutional workaround, and the underlying corporate-to-party pipeline survives intact.

Electoral trusts are now the principal channel. The Association for Democratic Reforms analysed contribution reports for 2024-25, the first full year after electoral bonds were scrapped, and found that nine trusts channelled Rs 3,826 crore to parties.

Three trusts account for over Rs 3,700 crore. Prudent Electoral Trust, established by the Bharti Group, disbursed Rs 2,668 crore. The single largest contributor to Prudent was Elevated Avenue Realty LLP, a firm linked to Larsen and Toubro, which put in Rs 500 crore. After Prudent, the New Democratic Electoral Trust disbursed Rs 160 crore. Progressive Electoral Trust came third, with the Tata Group's Rs 757.6 crore to the ruling party attached to that semiconductor subsidy sequence.

In 2023-24, total trust donations stood at Rs 1,218 crore. They tripled to Rs 3,826 crore in 2024-25. The electoral bonds scheme was scrapped, and yet corporate money to the political parties grew.

Electoral trusts are formally more transparent than electoral bonds. They disclose donor names and party-wise disbursements. This disclosure creates an alibi rather than accountability. A company that contributes to a trust can credibly claim it exercised no control over which party received the money. The trust becomes a firewall: technically transparent at its edges, while the decision-making remains invisible.

The ADR found that donor addresses were not disclosed for contributions worth over Rs 1,065 crore, the bulk of which went to Prudent. Five of the 20 trusts registered with the Central Board of Direct Taxes had not filed contribution reports with the ECI as of February 2026, three months after the deadline.

The ADR has recommended that each trust be required to include the name of its parent company or group in its own name. Prudent Electoral Trust would become Bharti Group Electoral Trust. Progressive Electoral Trust would become Tata Group Electoral Trust. The recommendation has not been acted on.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP declared expenditure of Rs 1,500 crore. The Congress declared Rs 600 crore. All major national and state parties together reported approximately Rs 3,300 crore. The Centre for Media Studies estimated total election spending in the 2024 cycle at Rs 1.35 lakh crore, a figure revised upward from an initial estimate of Rs 1 lakh crore after electoral bond disclosures.

The distance between those two numbers is a structural feature of the system. Official expenditure data, instead of reporting what was spent, simply records what was reported. These are apples and oranges.

Lok Sabha candidates face a legal spending ceiling of Rs 95 lakh. Actual campaign costs in competitive constituencies run from Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore per seat, according to those who have run. The gap is financed through party funds and undisclosed cash. Section 77(1) of the Representation of the People Act places a cap on candidate expenditure but explicitly excludes party spending from that limit. There is no corresponding ceiling on the party's side. Common Cause has been preparing a Supreme Court petition seeking a remedy to this anomaly.

Parties spent roughly Rs 3,400 crore officially in 2024. The BJP received Rs 6,088 crore in disclosed donations that same year, up from Rs 3,967 crore in the previous year. Congress received Rs 522 crore, down sharply from Rs 1,129 crore. The party funding asymmetry and the candidate expenditure asymmetry reinforce each other. The party with the money fields the candidates with the money. The candidates with criminal records often bring both.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, 251 of 543 elected MPs, which is 46%, had declared criminal cases against themselves. Of those, 170 had declared serious cases: murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, crimes against women. The share of MPs with serious criminal cases has grown from 14% in 2009 to 31% in 2024, a 124% increase over four election cycles.

The affidavit data reveals a precise winning advantage. A candidate with declared criminal cases won at a rate of 15.3% in 2024. A candidate with no criminal record won at a rate of 4.4%. Candidates with criminal backgrounds were three and a half times more likely to win.

The explanation runs through campaign finance, when it should run through voter preference. Party leaders distribute tickets to candidates with criminal records because those candidates self-finance their campaigns. At Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore a seat, the party cannot raise that money transparently for every constituency. The candidate with a criminal record fills the gap. He also brings ground-level organisational capacity that parties need in first-past-the-post contests, where a margin of 1-2% decides the outcome.

The crorepati data makes the same argument from a different angle. 93% of 2024 Lok Sabha winners declared assets above Rs 1 crore, up from 88% in 2019 and 58% in 2009. Winning Indian elections has become a function of personal wealth, and the threshold rises with each cycle.

Parties understand this. They respond to it rationally, within the incentive structure they operate in. The structure is the problem.

In 1957, Justice M.C. Chagla of the Bombay High Court ruled in favour of TISCO's right to donate to political parties, while asking Parliament to act. He warned that corporate money in politics carried a danger that might "overwhelm and even throttle democracy." Parliament has been considering his warning for 67 years.

The institutional record on reform is straightforward. Corporate donations were banned in 1969. They went underground. The ban was reversed in 1985. The 2017 electoral bonds scheme removed the upper limit on donations and made them anonymous. The Supreme Court removed the scheme in 2024. Electoral trusts absorbed the volume within months.

The Indrajit Gupta Committee recommended state funding of elections in 1998. The Law Commission declared it "desirable" in 1999, on the condition that parties be barred from raising private funds alongside it. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission backed partial state funding in 2008 for the stated purpose of reducing what it called illegitimate and unnecessary election expenditure. None of these recommendations produced legislation.

A former Chief Election Commissioner has proposed a national election fund: all corporate contributions pooled together, distributed to parties by the ECI based on electoral performance. The logic is sound. It breaks the direct corporation-to-party pipeline. The problem is that implementing it requires the parties that benefit most from the current pipeline to legislate themselves out of it. That has not happened in 67 years, and there is no current pressure to make it happen.

Rs 1.35 lakh crore in estimated actual spending. Rs 3,300 crore in reported expenditure. Rs 6,088 crore to one party and Rs 522 crore to the main opposition. A semiconductor subsidy of Rs 44,203 crore preceding a trust donation of Rs 757.6 crore by weeks. 46% of elected MPs carrying criminal records. A win rate three and a half times higher for candidates who declare criminal cases than for those who do not.

None of this is hidden. It is filed with the Election Commission, reported by the ADR, and indexed by the courts. The system is operating in plain sight, with a formal transparency architecture that discloses enough to satisfy legal requirements while protecting the decisions that actually matter.

Justice Chagla asked Parliament in 1957 to consider under what circumstances and under what limitations companies should be permitted to fund political parties. The question has been examined by committees and commissions across seven decades. The answer, in practice, has always been the same: under all circumstances and with the limits adjusted to whatever is politically convenient at the time.

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Anas Ahmad Tak