By Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party appears to have illegally collected public donations a few years ago in the name of government initiatives like Swachh Bharat, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and Kisan Seva. The NaMo app and narendramodi.in portal still show options of contributing to the government schemes in their donation pages.
RTI responses to queries filed by a Chennai-based senior journalist B.R. Aravindakshan, who is the news editor of the channel Sathiyam TV, showed that the BJP did not have any special permission or any authorisation from central ministries or the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to collect donations for the Union government’s welfare schemes.
The BJP ran a fundraising campaign between December 2021 and February 2022 through private platforms like narendramodi.in and the NaMo app, in which it asked contributors to donate funds for Swachh Bharat, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and Kisan Seva – all government schemes. Both the website and the app asked donors to choose between one of these three government schemes and list “party fund” as “cause for donation” while contributing to the BJP.
However, ministries responsible for implementing these schemes have clearly said now in their RTI responses that none of these platforms, or for that matter any other, had been promoted or authorised or given special permission to raise funds for the schemes.
On December 25, 2021, BJP president J.P. Nadda had announced a “micro-donation” campaign to strengthen the party on former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birth anniversary. He had said that the drive will end on February 11, 2022, the death anniversary of Hindutva icon Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.
Although Nadda had said that the donations will be collected to strengthen the party and its “mass movement”, the donors found that they were being asked to contribute towards government schemes, if they did not want to contribute towards building BJP’s “party fund”.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.