'Nothing has been concealed'
The apology came in the third sentence. “We regret the delay in the submission of the information,” the Bharatiya Janata Party’s office secretary wrote to the Election Commission of India on August 25, forwarding the party’s account of what it spent winning West Bengal and losing Kerala.
It was about five weeks late. The Commission gives a party 75 days after an assembly election to file, which puts the deadline at July 20, and lateness costs it almost nothing.
A candidate who fails to lodge an account can be barred from contesting for three years under Section 10A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951; the Act has no equivalent for the party that pays the candidate.
What arrived was 174 scanned pages, signed by the treasurer, Rajesh Agarwal, who declared that “nothing has been concealed”. The headline figure was ₹286.99 crore ($32.43 million) spent in West Bengal, more than the Congress spent across all five assembly elections this summer.
The BJP won 208 of Bengal’s 294 seats, and Suvendu Adhikari became chief minister. Read line by line, it shows who was paid to carry the party’s message, where the money went, and how loosely some books were kept.
Ten names
Headquarters’ schedule of media spending in Bengal runs to 36 lines and ₹55.77 crore. Google took ₹24.88 crore and Facebook’s Indian arm ₹6.51 crore, more than half the total between them. Then the column turns personal.
Ten payees are individuals, listed without a company, a channel or any description beyond the word “Electronic”. Together they received ₹1.22 crore in seven weeks.
The largest payment, ₹51 lakh, went to Suddhashil Ghosh. A man of that name is the face of Priyo Bandhu Media, a Bengali political news channel with about 10.2 lakh YouTube subscribers.
Police raided his home in September 2024, while he was making videos demanding accountability from Mamata Banerjee’s government over the RG Kar rape and murder. In May, Asianet News Bangla called him one of the principal architects of the BJP’s win in Memari.
We found no other public figure by that name. The filing gives no address for the payee, and does not say whether it is the same man, or what ₹51 lakh bought.
Two more names match people whom BJP figures have publicly championed, though neither match could be confirmed. A Shamik Adhikary was paid ₹13 lakh; a Kolkata creator of that name runs the comedy brand Nonsane, posted a satire on the Trinamool government before the election, and was backed by the BJP’s IT cell head, Amit Malviya, when arrested soon afterwards.
A “Sayak Charaborty” was paid ₹2.5 lakh; Sayak Chakraborty, an actor and influencer whose Olypub beef video BJP leaders amplified in January, had attended a BJP influencers’ meet. He denies acting for any party. The other seven, Jyotiraditya Roy, Priyanka Sarkar, Moumita Banik, Shikha Kundu, Iti Karmakar, Subrata Kundu and Sangit Sarkar, could not be tied to any public channel, page or portal.
The state unit’s own schedule adds Purnendu Chakraborty, ₹3 lakh for “electronic media”, and Kamlakar Prasad Gupta, ₹2.03 crore for photography and video, the largest sum paid to any person in the filing. No studio or company bears his name.
The distinction matters in law. Political advertising on television and social media must be cleared in advance by the Commission’s media monitoring committees.
Content that viewers take for news but a party has paid for is what the Commission, adopting the Press Council’s definition, calls paid news: “any news or analysis appearing in any media for a price in cash or kind”. The ledger cannot say which the ₹1.22 crore was. Nor, unless a video said so, could a viewer.
The outlets are easier to place. The News Bangla, paid ₹22 lakh, has about 15 lakh subscribers and promises to show first “what others suppress”. Madhyom Communications, ₹20.65 lakh, appears to be the company behind Madhyom, “a West Bengal based news portal” with 5.5 lakh subscribers.
Gavishti Media, paid ₹4.72 lakh in each state, is by its own terms of service the company that “owns and operates” OpIndia. Bharat Prakashan (Delhi), publisher of the RSS-linked Organiser, received ₹42.08 lakh. A party may advertise where it likes. What the filing adds is a record of the money.
₹18 crore to nowhere
The largest payee that is not a technology platform is “CNX Media”, ₹18,23,74,458, a third of headquarters’ Bengal media spend and nearly three times what Facebook received. The only Indian company of that name was incorporated in Delhi in 2012, filed accounts once, and is now struck off.
Its directors were Bhawesh Kumar Jha and Prabhakar Jha. Bhawesh Jha went on to run CNX, a polling firm; he told ThePrint last year that it was originally called CNX Media and that an election strategist had hired it to track the Delhi campaign.
Nothing in the filing connects the payee to him, and there may be a CNX Media we did not find. But ₹18 crore is a great deal of money to leave without an address. The Bengal unit’s books are opaque in a different way: Promodome Communications alone took ₹14 crore for “newspaper ads” with no newspaper named.
The notices
Since 2018 the Supreme Court has required parties to tell voters about criminal cases pending against their candidates, in “widely circulated newspapers in the locality”, at least three times after nominations. In 2020 it added that parties must publish their reasons for choosing them; in 2021 it fined the BJP for ignoring the order.
The Commission’s floors are a local-language paper of at least 25,000 copies and a national one above 75,000; it calls the party’s declarations Formats C-2 and C-7. No party in Bengal had more to declare: of 293 BJP candidates analysed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, 208 had criminal cases and 188 serious ones. The Trinamool’s figure was 112 of 290.
The filing shows ₹2,50,76,618 spent on the notices, in 206 entries, every one paid by bank transfer. Every entry pairs an English daily with a Bengali one and adds television spots on a channel identified only as “KTV”. 124 entries went to The Indian Express with Dainik Jugasankha and 82 to The Statesman with Dainik Statesman.
Not one went to Anandabazar Patrika, Bartaman, Sangbad Pratidin, The Telegraph or The Times of India. Anandabazar’s audited circulation in late 2022 was about 12 lakh copies and The Telegraph’s nearly 7 lakh; the papers the BJP chose do not appear in those figures, though absence does not by itself prove a paper is small. The court wanted voters to see the notices. The ledger shows where they went.
Two numbers sit awkwardly: 208 candidates with cases, 206 entries. Because the schedule does not name the candidate behind each entry, the accounts cannot determine whether two were missed. And elsewhere in the filing, in the state unit’s ordinary media schedule, Sanket Communications received ₹4,21,85,777 for “Print Media & TV expenses for C2 & C7”, the Commission’s own names for the disclosure forms.
If that is what the money paid for, the notices cost closer to ₹6.73 crore, and ₹4.22 crore of it was booked as campaign advertising, with no newspaper names and no dates.
Kerala followed a different pattern. Fifty-nine of the BJP’s 93 candidates there had declared cases. Of ₹96.05 lakh spent on notices, ₹77.98 lakh, or 81 per cent, went to Janmabhumi, a daily owned by Mathruka Pracharanalayam and described as politically aligned with the BJP.
Malayala Manorama, audited above 19 lakh copies, and Mathrubhumi, nearly 11 lakh, got nothing from this schedule, though the unit bought crores of ordinary advertising from both. One entry, for ₹3,60,195, names no newspaper at all.
The cash box
On 15 March, the day the election was announced, the BJP’s West Bengal unit held ₹2,43,45,084 in cash. On 6 May it held ₹11,92,79,484. Nobody handed the party cash in between: it declared no cash receipts, and everything it did receive, including ₹225 crore from Delhi, came by cheque or transfer.
It also spent ₹3.46 crore in cash. For the cash box to end where it did, at least ₹13 crore must have been drawn from the bank in seven weeks, unless it came from somewhere the accounts do not record.
The rules are loose, but they point one way. The Commission’s 2014 transparency guidelines require cash a party receives to be banked within a week, allow it to hold only “a reasonable amount required for day-to-day functioning”, bar cash payments above ₹20,000, and require payments to candidates by cheque, draft or transfer “and not in cash”.
Tax law adds that a party keeps its exemption only with proper books and no cash donation above ₹2,000. What the filing never explains is how ₹3.46 crore in cash was spent, or why ₹11.93 crore remained.
For scale: between 26 February and 6 May, the Commission’s flying squads seized ₹31.14 crore in cash across the whole of West Bengal, among total seizures of ₹573.41 crore. Two days after winning the state, the party’s Bengal unit, with its district and local committees, was holding more than a third as much cash as the squads had found.
Kerala’s unit ended with ₹1.03 crore in cash, almost where it began. But it made the only cash payments to a candidate in the entire filing: ₹49,500 on 23 March and ₹99,500 on 24 March to S Rajendran, its candidate in Devikulam.
And Delhi kept sending money to Bengal to the end: ₹25 crore on 24 March, ₹100 crore on 7 April, and another ₹100 crore on 6 May, the date the filing gives as the completion of the election, after the campaigning was over. The unit closed the period ₹106.6 crore richer than it began.
The ally
Kerala’s most arresting line has nothing to do with media. Under money given to “other party(s) for election expenses”, after 32 small payments to its own district committees, the state unit lists “20-Twenty”, ₹6,00,00,000, by RTGS on 25 March.
Twenty20, Sabu M. Jacob’s party, joined the NDA in January and lost all 19 seats it contested. In July its Thrikkakara candidate, Akhil Marar, quit, saying senior BJP leaders had told him ₹40 crore had gone to Jacob as election funds.
Days later, Onmanorama reported, Jacob maintained that Twenty20 had fully funded and reimbursed all its candidates’ expenses. The BJP’s ledger settles neither claim, but it is the first record we can find of money moving between the two parties.
Certified as true
The totals add up; we re-added every media schedule, and all but one match to the rupee. The paperwork around them is another matter. Thirty-eight of the Bengal unit's 39 media lines give the campaign period as running to May 6, 2027, a year after the election ended.
A ₹1.53 crore Kerala helicopter bill is dated March 14, a day before the election was announced, and a ₹3.7 crore aircraft bill in Bengal begins on 31 April. Kerala's candidate payments swap two names between rounds and record ₹2.5 lakh for Chathannoor, a seat the BJP won, with no mode of payment.
This report doesn’t prove wrongdoing. Political parties may advertise where they like, fund allies and keep cash for expenses. But the 174-page statement submitted to the Election Commission of India poses questions its own pages cannot answer. Who is CNX Media, and what did ₹18 crore buy?
Who are the ten people paid for “electronic” media, and did their audiences know? Why was the Bengal unit holding nearly ₹12 crore in cash when the campaign closed? And what did ₹6 crore to Twenty20 pay for?
The treasurer says no material fact has been concealed. Taken at his word, that is the point. Everything here is in the party’s own hand.
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Zulkarnain Saer is an investigative journalist