New Delhi:
The Congress
demanded on Wednesday that the government must disclose all details about
electoral bonds before Parliament, alleging that the scheme resulted in money
laundering and destroyed transparency in the funding of political parties.
Describing electoral bonds as a “political
bribery scheme”, the opposition party said it was a scam that tarnished
the image of the Indian democracy.
“What we are talking about today leads
straight to the PM’s office (PMO). 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.
He alleged that the scheme of electoral bonds
resulted in money laundering and destroyed transparency in the funding of
political parties.
Addressing a press conference here, 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.
Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha Adhir
Ranjan Chowdhury said, “On behalf of our party, we will strive to raise
this issue in Parliament and ask the government to come clean on this. (PTI)
