The Supreme Court may have put paid to the diabolical electoral bonds scheme run by the BJP-led Union Government, but the coffers of the ruling party continue to be filled by corporate entities. After anonymous funding of political parties through bonds was ruled unconstitutional last year, companies have switched back to the old system of routing money through electoral trusts. In 2024-25, these fronts are reported to have increased donations to political parties three-fold, pumping in Rs 3,811 crore, with the BJP getting the lion’s share of 82% and the Congress 8%, Rs 298.77 crore.

This lopsided flow of corporate money is no more transparent than the electoral bonds scheme and is no less undemocratic. The trusts do disclose the names of the donors but serve as fronts to camouflage the proximity of wealth craves and enjoys to political decision-makers. When a company pays an MP to ask a certain question in Parliament, it is plain bribery. When rich companies route crores to political parties through electoral trusts and receive favourable treatment, it cannot be called anything else.

Trust funding of parties in India is the same as corporate funding of political parties in the US, where important regulatory institutions have become prisoners to wealth-backed interests. There, as in India, the top 1% of donors account for a majority of political funding. The top 100 donors in the US contribute more than the combined contributions of millions of small donors. In India, where small donations are even more paltry, the disparity is even greater and produces even worse consequences.

Corporate trust-based funding overwhelmingly favours the party in power. Companies invariably donate to get a regulatory pass, gain a licence, get around an environmental clearance, or scupper an investigation. The 2024-25 data on electoral trust funding to political parties shows that the main donors to the BJP continue to be the same entities that figured at the top of the electoral bonds scheme, such as Bharti Airtel and Megha Engineering and Tata Sons.

While privileging parties in power, this system puts at a disadvantage parties representing Dalits, Adivasis, minorities, or civil society causes. Such parties lack access to corporate boardrooms and cannot promise policy favours that companies seek. This is not an incidental disadvantage; it is systemic.

Trust funding, in fact, accentuates the structural advantages ruling parties already enjoy today. First, they receive the overwhelming share of large donations. Second, they are able to deploy the government’s welfare spending to complement private funding. In the recent election in Bihar, cash transfers of Rs 10,000 to women beneficiaries were rolled out shortly before the Model Code of Conduct came into force. Third, ruling parties enjoy exclusive access to vast amounts of state-generated data — ration cards, welfare databases, health records, housing lists, caste surveys, voter rolls, etc. This data allows micro-targeting on a scale that opposition parties cannot match. Armed with corporate funding, ruling parties have the means, the wherewithal and the money to persuade and mobilise voters in ways no other party can.

Defenders of the current system argue that trust funding information is disclosed, unlike the bond scheme, and therefore kosher. Not quite. Transparency does not negate the unfair advantages awarded to ruling parties. It only means that we get to know about it and must therefore do something to rid the system of it.