With nothing left in the tank, the opposition parties and the leftist milieu are clinging to the issue of political donations via electoral bonds as a final straw to criticise the Narendra Modi-led BJP government as the 18th Lok Sabha election draws nearer.
The latest to join the bandwagon is non other than senior Supreme Court advocate; former Congress veteran leader and UPA Minister Kapil Sibal. In an interview with the ultra-leftist news portal The Wire, Sibal went on to lie that the BJP had illegally taken ‘bribes’ in electoral bonds as a quid pro quo arrangement to provide legal security or frame favourable laws to Future Gaming and Hotel Services at the time when ED probed the company in 2022.
To bolster this conspiracy theory, Sibal, not for a second, hesitated to lie through his teeth. However, Sibal’s claims were soon debunked by popular X user Ankur Singh who shared data which revealed that the amount of money that Sibal claimed the BJP had received was in reality received by the TMC and DMK.
Sharing a clip of the interview with The Wire where Kapil Sibal is heard spreading fake news on Electoral Bonds to malign BJP, popular X user Ankur Singh wrote, “How @KapilSibal spreads Fake News on Electoral Bonds. Sibal lists details of Electoral Bonds purchased but the bonds went to DMK and TMC.”
How @KapilSibal spreads Fake News on Electoral Bonds.
— Ankur Singh (Modi Ka Parivar) (@iAnkurSingh) April 2, 2024
Sibal lists details of Electoral Bonds purchased but the bonds went to DMK and TMC. pic.twitter.com/Ng5a6Svruq
Along with the clip of the interview, the X user shared a chart in which he highlighted the claims made by the former veteran Congress leader vis-a-vis the reality.
Journalist Karan Thapar of The Wire asks Kapil Sibal to expand on his points of view, which he brought up on his show “Dil Se,” namely that the BJP had received funds from electoral bonds in exchange for quid pro quo and/or possible extortion from the Enforcement Directorate or CBI.
In answer to Karan Tapar’s question, Kapil Sibal starts by giving the example of Future Gaming and Hotel Services, owned by scam-tainted Santiago Martin. The former leader of the Congress provided a series of dates in an attempt to paint a picture that the BJP obtained donations from companies such as Future Gaming through coercion by probing agencies.
The ex-Congress leader started by saying that on April 2, 2022, ED attached assets worth Rs 409 crores of Future Gaming and Hotel Services. On April 7 Future Gaming and Hotel Services purchased electoral bonds worth Rs 100 crores which, according to Sibal, the company gave in the form of donations to the BJP.
The Congress leader cited another set of dates to insinuate that merely 4 days after ED again attached properties of Future Gaming and Hotel Services on July 2, 2022, the company purchased Electoral Bonds worth 75 crores, and again gave them to the BJP in the form of donations.
Kapil Sibal further said, “If you match this with as to when the bonds were purchased, you realise and there has been investigation done that on that particular day in Chennai and Tamil Nadu, only one entity purchased those bonds. Therefore if only one entity purchased those bonds and those bonds were received by the BJP and this is happening immediately after the raids of the ED then quid pro quo is established.”
Kapil Sibal was essentially, attempting to peddle the same conspiracy theory that the entire leftist ecosystem has been peddling that the Electoral Bond scheme was a scam, “extortion”. According to their “calibrated” claims, selective donations including the one from firms like Future Gaming were part of a “quid pro quo”. According to their conspiracy theory, the BJP extorted money from scam-tainted firms like Future Gaming and Hotel Services to provide legal security or frame favourable laws.
Throughout his whole defence, Kapil Sibal insisted that Future Gaming and Hotel Services was the only company that had bought electoral bonds during that period and that the BJP was the only political party that received electoral bonds as donations at that time. Additionally, given that the entire transaction took place at the same time that the Enforcement Department raided Future Gaming and Hotel Services, Kapil Sibal jumped to the conclusion that the BJP had either extorted money from the latter to shield it from the agency’s investigation or that the latter had given the former a bribe to avoid being investigated by the latter.
Sibal was well aware of the fact that Santiago Martin, the “lottery king” and owner of Future Gaming and Hotel Services, has close ties to several political parties, including the Congress party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala, the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK) in Tamil Nadu, and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal. Furthermore, the majority of the bonds that Future Gaming bought were donated to the Trinamool Congress followed by DMK and others. But instead of bringing these important facts to the public’s attention, Kapil Sibal decided to overlook them in his attempts to criticise the BJP.
The truth is that, in a fresh set of data related to Electoral Bonds published by the Election Commission on March 17, it was revealed that Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) received Electoral Bonds worth Rs 509 crore from Santiago Martin’s Future Gaming.
In his post, X user Ankur Singh also highlighted how the Electoral Bond which the Future Gaming and Hotel Services bought on April 7, 2022, five days after ED seized assets worth Rs 409 crores of ‘lottery king’ Santiago Martin, was donated to Tamil Nadu’s DMK party.
Similarly, on July 6, 4 days after ED again raided the properties of Santiago Martin, his company, Future Gaming and Hotel Services bought Electoral Bonds worth a total of Rs 75 crores. Rs 50 crore from this amount was received by DMK and the rest Rs 25 crores were donated to the Trinamool Congress.
Despite this information being readily available to the public forum, former Congress veteran leader Kapil Sibal went on to lie blatantly to accuse the BJP of receiving those amounts from Future Gaming and Hotel Services instead of saving the company from ED scrutiny. He conveniently hid the fact that it was not BJP but DMK and TMC which had received the said amount.
He repeated the same conspiracy theory that is being peddled by the entire leftist ecosystem that the BJP has indulged in corruption and used electoral bonds as a legal way to force corporate houses to donate.
