 "AAP, Arvind Kejriwal")
On November 17, 2013, Delhi chief ministerial candidate Arvind Kejriwal thanked his supporters for generously donating to his one-year-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Kejriwal told his donors he did not need more money, as he had already achieved the target of Rs 20 crore needed to fight the Delhi Assembly elections the following month.
Riding high on public expectation, Kejriwal won the election, only to resign as chief minister four months later, after his party failed to pass its version of the Jan Lokpal Bill in the Assembly.
A year later, elections again re-held in the national capital and Kejriwal returned as Delhi chief minister, with a bigger mandate.
Cut to August 22, 2016, and Kejriwal said the AAP doesn't have the money to contest the upcoming Assembly elections of Punjab and Goa - the states where the party thinks it has fair chances of upsetting the current political equation and success in these two states can help it make more inroads in other states.
Kejriwal's recent statement on fund requirement can be understood in two ways.
First, donations to the party have dried up since the February 2015 Delhi Assembly elections. Second, it needs more funds, in the light of its expansion into other states. The data available on AAP's website (aaptrends.com) suggest the party has received only Rs 5 crore in the past one year.
However, it would be too early to say if this drying of funds is a sign of growing disenchantment of its supporters, as the party had most of its funding during the time of elections. AAP received nearly Rs 18 crore between the date of announcement of the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections and the date of polling. The party spent a little over Rs 19 crore for elections on Delhi's 70 Assembly seats.
What should worry AAP is that its donation has fallen to as little as Rs 2,000 a day. If the party doesn't get enough donations before the onset of the Punjab and Goa elections, this would not only hurt its prospects but be a judgment on the Kejriwal government's performance in the national capital.
A rough calculation suggests Kejriwal is right in saying AAP needs funding to contest the coming elections. The party has a leftover amount of around Rs 5 crore from the previous collection and another Rs 5 crore it got through donations between March 2015 and July 2016. This Rs 10 crore is supposedly being used to fund operations in Delhi and elsewhere. The party, started in Delhi in November 2012, claims to have presence in all states.
Yogendra Yadav, once a close ally of Kejriwal and now set to launch his own political party, said AAP cannot take on the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in Punjab with its way of crowd-funding the elections.
"I suspect AAP has decided that it is ready to take traditional way of collecting funds, like other political parties. The pretence of AAP being a party with a difference is going away. They have decided to play by the rules of established parties," Yadav says. "It is not that their capacity to collect money has gone down; it is that their requirements have gone up."
Not only SAD - the data suggest AAP is far behind the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in resources and donations. A review of expenditure of the 2015 Delhi elections, available with the Election Commission, reveals the stark difference among the balance sheets of AAP, the Congress and BJP. If AAP had a remaining balance of around Rs 5 crore, the Congress' national headquarters had a balance of Rs 182 crore in its accounts and its Delhi unit held Rs 68 lakh in separate accounts. The BJP accounts showed Rs 23 crore with its national headquarters and another Rs 61 lakh with its Delhi unit at the end of the 2015 poll.
The other advantage BJP and Congress have is that they got more funding for the elections they fought after the 2015 one in Delhi, whereas AAP will be testing the waters for the first time after two years.
Yadav's suspicion of AAP resorting to traditional way of fund collection, which usually doesn't find mention in any record of party or donors, was based on the premise that AAP had stopped putting the donation and donors' list on its website after July 2016.
Despite repeated attempts, AAP national secretary Pankaj Gupta, spokesperson and treasurer Raghav Chadha and its Punjab elections in-charge Sanjay Singh refused to speak on the issue of funding. Dilip Pandey, in charge of Delhi affairs, said they were not able to update the list on their website as they were re-designing the site and migrating it to different servers. "The process is slow because we don't have adequate funds to do it," Pandey says.
Asked about how the party was raising funds for the Punjab and Goa Assembly elections, Pandey said it was the responsibility of the respective state units to collect funds before the elections.
AAP has not only come under the scanner from its political rivals on the issue of funding. Its own functionaries, including a member of its national council, have alleged senior leaders are selling election tickets for Rs 1-2 crore each in Punjab - somewhat similar to the practice followed by regional parties in states. This adds more pressure on AAP to come clean on its donations.
