Gandhis hog bulk of Cong campaign spends; BJP could show a Modi skew too

When it comes to the Gandhis, the Congress is clearly not afraid to put its money where its mouth is. Literally.

A report in The Times of India says that the grand old party spent a whopping 93 percent of its 2013 assembly poll budget on advertising and travel expenses of the Gandhi family, and a few other star campaigners like Manish Tewari, Digvijaya Singh, AK Antony and Jyotiraditya Scindia. This amounted to around Rs 30 crore, the report said, adding that the travel expenditure of all other party leaders combined in the five states was less than Rs 7 lakh.

This was also the case in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

According to the data, the Congress’s first family was a clear favourite of the party when it came to distribution of funds in the last general elections. This has been gleaned from expenditure data submitted by party treasurer Motilal Vora recently to the Election Commission.

The interesting point to note is that while crores were spent on Sonia and Rahul for the assembly elections, their own expenses to get themselves elected to the Lok Sabha this year could not have exceeded Rs 70 lakh - the upper limit in large states like Uttar Pradesh, where both mother and son got elected.

The data revealed that all Congress candidates in the last Lok Sabha polls on an average got Rs 10 lakh each as the party’s financial support.

However, this situation is unlikely to be unique to the Congress, for in the BJP camp, the bulk of the campaign expenses would have been spent on Narendra Modi and a few top leaders.

Poll expenditures figures for the BJP during the same period have not been released as yet, but it is highly likely that we will see a similar percentage of poll funds expended towards the party’s star campaigner.

Why? Because the poll expenditure limits placed on candidates is low. For example, in the recent Lok Sabha polls, the upper limits for expenditure on candidates was raised from Rs 40 lakh to Rs 70 lakh in the bigger states and from Rs 22 lakh to Rs 54 lakh in smaller states. However, the late Gopinath Munde created a storm last year when he claimed he spent Rs 8 crore on his Lok Sabha election . He later recanted, and claimed it was mere rhetoric.

However, it is an open secret that few candidates stick to their poll limits. The extra spending is either not disclosed, or sometimes gets lumped in the expenditures of star campaigners. When costs are attributed to star campaigners like Modi or the Gandhi family, it is tougher to stick the numbers to individual candidates with lower limits.

The line separating the costs of star campaigners and candidates is often deliberately blurred.

According to information provided by the Association for Democratic Rights - and election watchdog - the BJP has missed the deadline to furnish details of its expenditure on advertising and travel for its candidates.

But given the party’s high decibel advertising campaign and the frequency with which Modi was helicoptered in and out of all states, the chances are the data will show a larger overall amount was spent on advertising and Modi’s campaigns and travels.