With reference to N Sundaresha Subramanian’s report “Congress, BJP got Rs 5,000 crore from unknown sources in last 10 yrs” (November 17), it is ironical to learn that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, which are fighting in Parliament over the right way to tackle black money, have been hiding many skeletons in their own cupboards in the form of thousands of crores of unaccounted money over the past 10 years. It may be added that the provisions of the Income Tax Act require that payments exceeding Rs 20,000 needed to be made through the banking channels, facilitating audit trails.
It is intriguing that while an “individual” has to do a lot of explaining to the nation’s IT department even for some very genuine financial transactions but our national political parties have so long been clinching some low hanging fruits in the guise of “sale of coupons”, “Aajiwan Sahyog Nidhi”, “relief fund”, “miscellaneous income”, “voluntary contributions”, “contribution from meetings/morchas”, etc.
If one goes by this report, the Congress party, led by Sonia-Rahul Gandhi (a self-acclaimed crusader against various wrong doings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government), so proudly tops the table of six national parties with Rs 3,323 crore or 83% of its total income. Mind you, the BJP is not too far behind. It has, in the process, earned the dubious distinction of being the first runners-up in the ongoing race for amassing such unaccounted money with its “earnings” standing at Rs 2,125 crore or 65%.
The moot question is: Why such double standards? How come the CBDT was allowing the emergence of such political corruption in the account books of all our national political parties? Why some are more equal than others in India?
If the PM really means business when he speaks of total eradication of the menace of the black money in all its manifestation in the economy, then he should set an example by urgently asking the chief of his own party (BJP) to come clean on the issue of the political corruption of this nature. After all, charity begins at home.
S Kumar, New Delhi
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