Indian politics roiled as huge donations are linked to investigated firms

Mahendra Kumar Jalan was an Indian millionaire with a diversified portfolio of food processing plants, dairy farms and commercial real estate. As he faced scrutiny from the Indian government’s financial crimes investigators in 2019, he began to put money in something else.

Jalan’s companies confidentially donated millions to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, newly released records show. Jalan eventually gifted a total of $42 million to the BJP while he was under federal investigation.

Jalan’s case was one of many subplots that have burst into public view and roiled Indian politics and business after the Indian Supreme Court forced a state-owned bank to disclose the buyers and recipients of “electoral bonds,” an arrangement introduced in 2017 that allowed companies to give unlimited campaign contributions under a cloak of confidentiality.

The resulting data dump has provided a rare glimpse into the machinery of Indian politics, revealing how $2 billion have been secretly funneled by Indian companies into political parties since 2018, with roughly half going toward the ruling BJP. And the disclosures have caused a public furor just weeks before the country votes in a national election that political scientists predict could be the world’s most expensive, at a cost of $15 billion, outstripping even the expected price tag of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.