Whose money are we talking about?

Sometimes satire asks the question that politics would rather avoid. The Cockroach Janta Party's latest campaign, ‘School Thik Karo’, has now been juxtaposed against a simple question: if the government has money to keep repairing and renovating official residences of Union ministers, why does it not have enough urgency to fix government schools?

'Stop fixing your lavish homes, and fix the schools!' CJP said in an X post, responding to a PTI report on the record expenditure on ministers' official residences.

Its arithmetic was deliberately eye-catching: Rs 92 crore could pay for 10 new world-class government schools, the pressure group said. "The money is available, the intent to use it for government schools is missing."

The arithmetic can certainly be debated. The question behind it is harder to dismiss. According to information obtained by PTI through an RTI query, expenditure on renovation, furnishing and repair of official residences of Union ministers rose from Rs 27.47 crore in 2014-15 to a record Rs 92.35 crore in 2025-26. The Central Public Works Department spent a cumulative Rs 547.68 crore on such works over the 12 years.

The government has an entirely reasonable explanation. Many of these bungalows are 80 to 100 years old and require extensive maintenance, with officials citing seepage, termite infestation and ageing electrical and plumbing systems.

Fair enough. The point is not that ministers should live in unsafe houses, or that official residences should never be repaired. It is that public expenditure is also a statement of priorities.

There is another reason the Rs 92.35-crore figure deserves attention: the BJP knows precisely how politically potent expenditure on a politician's official residence can be. The previous AAP government in Delhi found that out when the BJP turned the renovation of former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's official residence into a major political controversy, repeatedly branding the property a 'sheesh mahal' and accusing Kejriwal of extravagance.

Now, AAP leader Somnath Bharti has asked why the same media ecosystem that debated Kejriwal's residence at length is not debating the Rs 92-crore expenditure on the official homes of ministers in the Modi government.

The comparison does raise a legitimate question about political consistency. If expenditure on a politician's official home can be turned into evidence of entitlement, extravagance and misplaced priorities in one government, why should Rs 547.68 crore spent over 12 years maintaining the official homes of Union ministers be treated as little more than an administrative footnote?

And that question takes us neatly to Rahul Gandhi, and the Pune leg of his ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj’ campaign.

The BJP has supplied its own title: ‘Paison Ki Goonj’. The allegation is that the Congress paid social media influencers and participants to generate a crowd for the event, with BJP leaders citing figures running into crores.

If the allegation is true, it should be investigated. If the Congress paid people to attend, show the evidence. If influencers were paid, show the contracts, invoices or transactions. If rules were broken, establish how.

There is nothing unreasonable about scrutinising the expenditure of a political party. Political parties spend money on venues, publicity, logistics, volunteers and mobilisation. Their accounts should be subject to scrutiny.

But there is a difference between questioning political expenditure and using an allegation about expenditure to question the authenticity of political participation itself. The BJP's formulation invites the public to look at the money and then infer that the people who attended were not there because they wanted to be.

Why should that follow? Rahul Gandhi was not conducting a government programme. He was attending an event organised by his party. If the Congress spent money organising it, that is hardly remarkable. The question is whether the alleged spending was improper — not whether the existence of a budget proves that the participants were bought.

And there is an even more basic question the ‘Paison Ki Goonj’ campaign seems to evade: What if those young women actually wanted to hear Rahul Gandhi?

This is where the larger issue begins. The BJP has chosen to make money the central question around Rahul Gandhi's Pune event. But once money becomes the measure of political authenticity, the standard cannot logically stop at an Opposition gathering.

It has to be applied everywhere. It has to reach the Rs 92.35 crore spent maintaining ministers' residences last year. It has to reach the Rs 547.68 crore spent on such work over 12 years. And it has to reach PM CARES.

PM CARES is not Narendra Modi's personal fund. It is chaired by the prime minister, and its head office is the Prime Minister's Office. It is funded through voluntary contributions rather than a direct allocation from the government budget.

Those distinctions matter. But they do not end the discussion.

The PMO was central to the fund's creation and promotion. Government employees have, at various points, been encouraged or instructed to contribute from their salaries. The fund has consequently benefited from the extraordinary reach and authority of the office of the PM.

And it has accumulated a very substantial corpus. At the end of 2024-25, PM CARES reportedly had Rs 8,452.95 crore. It earned around Rs 475 crore in interest during the year, almost matching the roughly Rs 480 crore it received in fresh contributions. About 93 per cent of the corpus was reportedly parked in fixed deposits.

And yet PM CARES has remained outside the ordinary transparency framework that citizens might expect to apply to an institution so closely identified with the PMO.

Attempts to obtain information about the fund through the RTI framework have repeatedly encountered legal barriers, and the issue remains the subject of litigation.

That creates a curious institutional tension. PM CARES derives enormous visibility and political authority from its association with the PMO, while information about the fund has been fiercely contested under the very transparency regime that exists to allow citizens to scrutinise public institutions.

Again, the point is not that PM CARES is simply "taxpayers' money". It is not. The point is that institutional authority has value too. When the PMO is used to create, promote and raise money for a fund carrying the prime minister's constitutional title, the distinction between public authority and private contribution becomes considerably more complicated than the phrase 'voluntary donation' might suggest.

If money is going to be the measure of political legitimacy, the country should follow the money everywhere — not just where it is politically convenient. Because the issue isn't whether politics costs money. It is why some people's spending becomes a scandal while others' spending becomes governance.