Govt must disclose all details about electoral bonds before Parliament: Congress

The Congress demanded on Wednesday that the government must disclose all details about electoral bonds before Parliament, stressing that the scheme has resulted in money laundering and destroyed transparency in the funding of political parties.

Describing electoral bonds as a "political bribery scheme", the opposition party said it was a scam that tarnished the image of the Indian democracy.

"What we are talking about today leads straight to the PM's office. The BJP government is running 90 per cent of the business in this country with a few industrialists," senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said.

He alleged that the scheme of electoral bonds resulted in money laundering and destroyed transparency in the funding of political parties.

Addressing a press conference at Parliament House, Azad, along with party colleagues Anand Sharma and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said under the electoral bonds scheme, the donor buying the bonds could hide his identity and at the same time, a political party needed to share the details as regards from whom it got how much money.

"Our demand is that the PM must intervene and the government must disclose full donor information, who donated crores to the BJP coffers, and place this information before Parliament," Sharma said.

Parliament is in session and the government should make the disclosure before both the houses, he added.

The Congress leaders further said that the government introduced the scheme by ignoring the objections of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Election Commission and that it was a way of political extortion of money.