The Money, the Megaphone, and the Myth

This is the fourth part of a six-part series on the invisible machines of Indian democracy.

In Part 1, we discussed that Indian democracy runs on two machines operating side by side. One is voluntary, built over generations through unpaid work. The other is funded by the state. In Part 2, we traced the Sangh’s century-old voluntary network. In Part 3, we looked at where the BJP’s national network reaches its limits, in Tamil Nadu, Bengal, and Kerala. This part is about what makes any of it possible: MONEY.

There are four kinds of political money in India today. Each comes from a different source. Each powers a different part of the machine. And the most important one is not the one most people usually think of.

If you ask most reasonably aware people about political money, they will still mention the now-scrapped electoral bonds. The Rs 16,500 crore that moved through that system between 2018 and the Supreme Court striking it down in February 2024 was the biggest political funding story of the past decade. It was also the most talked about. By the time the court shut down the scheme, almost every commentator in the country had written about it.

But the bonds story is over. The real story now is something else.

In the financial year that has just begun, twelve state governments will spend about Rs 1.7 lakh crore on cash transfers to women. Not on welfare in general, but on one specific kind of welfare: direct monthly cash, branded with a leader’s name and a party’s signature. That figure is larger than the entire central health budget. It is larger than the entire central education budget. And it is more than ten times what passed through electoral bonds in their best year.

This is the real story. In India, political money is no longer mostly money that goes to political parties. It is increasingly money that flows from parties in power to voters. It flows from taxpayers like you and me into government coffers, and then back out through the same digital plumbing that delivers other welfare payments. That means it operates on a scale and at a speed no party-funding mechanism could match.

There is a second number worth keeping in mind alongside this one. According to research published in 2025 by Felix Pal and Christophe Jaffrelot, working with The Caravan, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh now has at least 2,500 organisations connected to its network. Most are in India; some are abroad. They run schools, hospitals, hostels, training centres, vocational programmes, tribal welfare projects, women’s groups, and much else besides. No other Indian political tendency has anything comparable; not the Congress, not the Left, not the regional parties. The Sangh is the only Indian political movement with a permanent service-delivery infrastructure that the country’s CSR architecture can legally fund.

These two facts, the Rs 1.7 lakh crore in branded welfare and the 2,500-organisation voluntary network, are at the heart of the political-money story in India today. And they sit alongside two more.

The third is the megaphone. Governments at the Centre and in the states now spend so much on advertising welfare schemes that the launch of any new programme effectively becomes a campaign event. The Central Bureau of Communication alone spent Rs 655 crore in the financial year that just ended. State governments together spend several times more. In the four months before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, this central advertising agency spent more on Google ads than the Congress spent over six years.

The fourth is the parallel economy: political consultancies, temple board revenues, real estate, mining and construction networks, and a growing AI-driven information industry that has now had its first major Indian outing in Assam. This stream is the hardest to count because most of it is, by design, hard to count. It is also where money that does not show up in the first three streams eventually lands.

Four streams. Four kinds of money. We will look at each one. But the deeper argument sits beneath them all.

The same Aadhaar number that authenticates a Lakshmir Bhandar payout also authenticates a voter on the electoral roll. The same database that lists beneficiaries also lists voters. The same digital infrastructure that decides who gets paid also shapes who gets registered. These four streams are not separate rivers. They flow into the same delta.

The welfare floor has a leader’s name on it

Let’s start with the biggest money story.

In the financial year 2025–26, twelve Indian state governments are running unconditional cash transfer schemes for women. Three years ago, only two states were doing this. According to PRS Legislative Research and the Economic Survey for 2025–26, the total outlay has jumped from about Rs 19,000 crore to about Rs 1.7 lakh crore. That is a ninefold rise in just three years. Six of the twelve states will run revenue deficits this year as a direct result.

These schemes go by different names in different states. In West Bengal, there was Lakshmir Bhandar. In Maharashtra, Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana. In Karnataka, Gruha Lakshmi. In Madhya Pradesh, Ladli Behna. In Tamil Nadu, Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai. In Odisha, Subhadra. In Assam, Orunodoi. In Telangana, Mahalakshmi. In Jharkhand, Maiya Samman. In Bihar, the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana was rolled out by the Nitish Kumar government before the November 2025 election. In Punjab, the AAP government announced its Rs 1,100 monthly transfer in January 2026. And in Andhra Pradesh, the TDP-led NDA has its DBT umbrella schemes.

The amounts vary. Lakshmir Bhandar paid Rs 1,500 per month to general-category women and Rs 1,700 to SC/ST women, following a February 2026 hike. Ladki Bahin pays Rs 1,500 a month. Gruha Lakshmi pays Rs 2,000. Ladli Behna pays Rs 1,250. Subhadra pays Rs 10,000 a year. Orunodoi pays Rs 1,250 a month. Mahalakshmi, Maiya Samman, and the others fall in a similar range.

What stands out is not just the amount. It is the timing.

These schemes are launched, expanded, or increased in a clear election cycle. Lakshmir Bhandar went from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 before the April 2026 Bengal state poll. Ladki Bahin was launched in August 2024, just weeks before the Maharashtra election. Subhadra was launched in September 2024 with a five-year corpus meant to survive beyond one election cycle. Orunodoi’s Rs 9,000 lump-sum payment on 10 March 2026, covering four months plus a Bihu bonus, landed in bank accounts one day before the Assam election was announced.

PRS Legislative Research, which produces some of the sharpest fiscal analysis in India, now treats the pre-election hike as a structural feature of state budgets rather than a one-off decision. The political logic is now so predictable that budget officers in twelve states are building it into their planning.

Two patterns are worth pausing over.

The first is the brand. Lakshmir Bhandar carried Mamata’s presence without using her name directly. Lakshmi is the goddess; Bhandar is the treasury. Together, the phrase means “the treasury of the goddess of wealth.” The unspoken third element is Didi as the giver. Every beneficiary who receives the monthly payment also receives a short SMS confirming the payment. The SMS does not need to mention any leader. The brand does that work.

The same pattern repeats across states. In Maharashtra, Ladki Bahin means “my dear sister,” with the Chief Minister positioned as the elder brother. Subhadra is named after Krishna’s sister, with the Chief Minister placed inside that family frame. Gruha Lakshmi places the goddess inside the household. None of this is accidental. Each name presents a particular leader as the implied giver of a specific gift to a specific beneficiary.

This is not just advertising. It is identity-making at scale. A woman receiving Rs 1,500 every month in her own bank account, linked to her Aadhaar, along with a monthly SMS announcing the credit, builds a different relationship with the giver than a woman receiving the same amount in cash from a local party worker. The bank account creates the citizen-state link. The brand creates the citizen-leader link. The cash does the rest.

The second pattern is speed. After the 4 May 2026 Bengal verdict, the new BJP government under Suvendu Adhikari announced on 11 May, within just six days after taking office, that Lakshmir Bhandar would be replaced by a new scheme called Annapurna Bhandar, paying Rs 3,000 a month. The implementation guidelines are still pending. But the announcement itself, made within a week of the swearing-in, shows what the new government understands: the welfare-branding architecture is the real inheritance. Whoever controls the state controls the brand. Whoever controls the brand can rename it and double the amount attached to it.

There is one more number that helps put this story in perspective. The Rs 1.7 lakh crore in welfare branding is more than ten times what flowed through electoral bonds in their best year. It is also about ten times what the central government spends on its flagship women’s empowerment programme, Mission Shakti. The money funding women’s welfare in India today is overwhelmingly state money, branded by individual leaders, delivered through digital infrastructure, and timed to electoral cycles.

There is no real equivalent to this in any large democracy. The closest comparison is the early-2000s expansion of conditional cash transfers in Latin America. But those programmes were not branded, not timed around elections, and not run at this scale.

Structurally, this means the welfare floor we discussed in Part 3 of this series, the cash transfers, scholarships, and free travel that have become the baseline of Indian electoral politics, is no longer just a floor. It is a floor with a leader’s name written on it. And the political money that pays for it does not go into a party’s campaign account. It goes straight into the bank account of the voter the party wants to mobilise.

The line between a welfare scheme and a campaign is now fading fast. If you want to understand this entire model in just one sentence, it is this: you, the taxpayer, are funding the ruling party’s election campaign without having any say in it.

The voluntary machine has a balance sheet, too

Now to the second number we began with: 2,500 organisations.

The Sangh’s voluntary network is one of the most studied and least understood political infrastructures in India. Most coverage focuses on the shakhas, the small morning gatherings where volunteers do exercises and drills and engage in ideological discussions. There are about 73,000 shakhas across the country today, the highest count in the Sangh’s hundred-year history. But the shakhas are only the smallest part of the network. The bigger part is the service-delivery system that the shakhas feed into.

Felix Pal at the University of Western Australia, working with Christophe Jaffrelot at Sciences Po and The Caravan magazine, published the most comprehensive map of this infrastructure in December 2025. The project is called Seeing the Sangh. It identifies 2,500 organisations connected to the RSS network, of which 2,240 are based in India. They are spread across 40 countries. The state-wise distribution within India places Uttar Pradesh at 293 organisations, Maharashtra at 293, Kerala at 247, and Karnataka at 225.

Each affiliate does a specific job. Vidya Bharati runs schools. Its own annual reporting says it has 12,094 formal schools across 682 districts, with more than 34 lakh students and 1.37 lakh teachers. There are 8,000 additional non-formal centres in slums, tribal areas, and the North-East. Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram runs tribal welfare programmes across 400 districts, including hostels with more than 20,000 students. Sewa Bharati is an umbrella organisation covering more than 900 NGOs working in health, education, and vocational training. Ekal Vidyalaya runs single-teacher schools, operating around 1,02,753 schools across 27 states. There are also smaller affiliates: Deendayal Research Institute in rural development, Saraswati Shishu Mandir in early childhood education, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh in trade unions, ABVP in student politics, and many others.

Each one is registered separately. Each files its own accounts. There is no single consolidated balance sheet because there is no single consolidated entity. The RSS itself is not registered as a body and does not file accounts. This is not an accident. The architecture is built to avoid easy mapping.

What changed between 2014 and 2026 is how this network is funded.

In 2013, the Companies Act introduced Section 135. Any company with a net worth above Rs 500 crore, turnover above Rs 1,000 crore, or net profit above Rs 5 crore had to spend 2 per cent of its average net profits on Corporate Social Responsibility. At the time, that amount sounded modest. By 2023–24, the latest year for which the Ministry of Corporate Affairs has published consolidated data, total CSR spending across India had reached Rs 34,908 crore, spread across 27,188 companies and 59,633 projects. Total CSR investment since 2014 has crossed Rs 1.53 lakh crore.

CSR funds must flow through registered intermediaries such as Section 8 companies, registered public trusts, and registered societies. This is where the Sangh’s network has a structural advantage that no other political tendency in India can match. Vidya Bharati is a registered trust. Sewa Bharati is a registered trust. Ekal Vidyalaya operates through the Ekal Abhiyan Trust. Every major Sangh affiliate has the legal architecture needed to receive CSR funds.

A clear example came during the COVID-19 lockdown. A Caravan investigation in May 2020 found that 736 Sangh-affiliated NGOs were enlisted as COVID warriors in the central government’s NGO-Darpan database. This made them eligible for State Disaster Relief Fund payouts and subsidised foodgrain from the Food Corporation of India. No other political tendency in India had anything close to 736 NGOs listed in a single window.

The opposition’s voluntary infrastructure does not come anywhere close to this. It doesn’t even look anything like it.

The Congress has Seva Dal, but that is a cadre wing, not a service-delivery network. It has the Indian National Trade Union Congress, which, on paper, had 33.95 million members in 2013, but the last government-verified central trade union membership exercise was completed in 2002, so any current claim cannot really be verified. It does not have a national school chain. It does not have a national health network. The Left has CITU, AIDWA, SFI, DYFI, and AIKS, all significant in Kerala, parts of Tamil Nadu, and pockets of Tripura and West Bengal. But the Left’s national service-delivery footprint has shrunk sharply since 2011. The DMK has the Dravidar Kazhagam lineage and a party-aligned media ecosystem. That is useful for mobilisation, not for service delivery. The TMC’s service delivery has mostly been state-funded rather than independently voluntary. The Samajwadi Party’s Lohia Vahini is a cadre body. AAP has no comparable voluntary infrastructure at all.

Here is a simple way to understand this. When a corporation in Bengaluru or Mumbai writes a Section 135 CSR cheque for education or healthcare, that cheque has to go somewhere. At scale, the two obvious options are church- or convent-run institutions (the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India runs roughly 14,000 schools and 1,000 hospitals nationally) or Sangh-affiliated trusts. Both are legal. Both already have the right structures in place. And when a corporation makes such a donation, it does so with the broader business environment in mind, making the choice of NGO both obvious and easy.

To be clear, this is not a story of money going directly from corporations to political parties. The CSR system does not allow that. It is a story of money flowing from corporations into service-delivery networks that are formally non-political yet have deep historical, ideological, and operational links to a single national political movement. The corporation acts legally. The trust acts legally. The political movement benefiting from that service delivery also acts legally. The imbalance lies in the structure itself.

The megaphone

The third stream is the loudest.

The Central Bureau of Communication is the unified outreach wing of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It spends central government money on advertising. Television, print, radio, hoardings, and increasingly digital. The latest published figures show Rs 656.08 crore in the financial year 2023-24 and Rs 643.63 crore in 2024-25. Both numbers are roughly double the Rs 317 crore the agency spent in 2021-22. The 14-year arc starts at Rs 766 crore in 2014-15, peaks at Rs 889 crore in 2017-18, troughs at Rs 215 crore in 2021-22, and rebuilds in the run-up to 2024.

The pattern itself is revealing. CBC spending is not steady. It rises and falls with election cycles. The low point in 2021–22 came between major election windows. The peak in 2017–18 came before the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The rise from 2022 onward tracks the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election and the 2026 state cycle.

The most striking piece of reporting on CBC spending came from Akash Bisht at Al Jazeera in May 2024. Bisht looked at Google’s Ads Transparency Centre for the 113 days between 16 November 2023 and 15 March 2024, the period before the Election Commission’s pre-poll cut-off. In that window, the Central Bureau of Communication spent Rs 38.7 crore on Google ads. That made it India’s single biggest spender on quasi-political government advertising on Google in that period. The BJP itself spent Rs 31.4 crore. The Congress, by comparison, had spent Rs 27.5 crore on Google ads over the previous six years. In other words, the central government’s publicity arm outspent the biggest opposition party’s six-year total by 41 per cent in just four months, on just one platform.

Once the full 2024 Lok Sabha cycle is counted, the picture becomes even sharper. Between February and May 2024, the BJP spent Rs 116 crore on Google ads, running 184,247 separate advertisements, with 140 videos each crossing 10 million views. The Congress spent Rs 45 crore across 3,811 ads. The BJD spent Rs 21 crore. The Samajwadi Party and the RJD spent nothing.

State governments add several times more through their own advertising budgets. There is no single all-India number because each state’s spending has to be pieced together separately through RTI requests. But researchers who have tracked this work consistently identify Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu as among the biggest state government spenders, with pre-election spikes seen in Karnataka in 2023 and Maharashtra in 2024.

What this stream pays for is the creation of a brand around the scheme. CBC ads carry the Prime Minister’s image. Most state government ads carry the Chief Minister’s as well as the Prime Minister’s image. The welfare schemes named after leaders or leader-like figures are then advertised through the same channels, with the same faces. The branded scheme reaches a voter through a digital payment. The advertised brand reaches the same voter through every screen they look at. That mutual reinforcement is the point.

A small but telling detail: CBC advertisements during the 113 days leading up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election often echoed BJP campaign slogans. “Modi ki guarantee” appeared in central government advertising during that period. “Modi ka parivar” appeared too. The Congress filed a complaint with the Election Commission on 22 March 2024, alleging a violation of election rules. No action was taken before voting began. The Al Jazeera investigation documented the slogan overlap directly.

However loud it may sound, the megaphone stream is the smallest of the four in pure rupee terms. It is also the most visible. And it is what turns branded welfare into a familiar political identity. Without the megaphone, the name on the scheme would not stick. With it, a woman in Hooghly knows whose name is on her Rs 1,500 payment without anyone having to say it openly.

Bonds, consultancies, temples, and the things we cannot count

The fourth stream is the parallel economy. By design, the hardest to count.

Start with electoral bonds, because every discussion eventually returns to them. Between 2018 and the Supreme Court striking the scheme down in February 2024, electoral bonds worth Rs 16,518 crore moved through Indian politics. The Association for Democratic Reforms, using the SBI and ECI disclosures of March 2024, found that the BJP redeemed Rs 6,565 crore of this, about 54 per cent of the total, in the first five years for which audit reports are available. The Congress redeemed Rs 1,123 crore, around 9 per cent. The TMC redeemed Rs 1,092 crore. The BRS Rs 912 crore. The BJD Rs 774 crore. The DMK Rs 617 crore. The CPI(M) refused to use the instrument on principle. A further Rs 4,509 crore in bonds was sold between April 2023 and January 2024 across five phases, with full party-wise reconciliation still incomplete and remains unavailable.

The bonds were not designed for a normal corporate philanthropy. It was what one Indian political scientist has called “Chanda do, Dhanda lo” scheme. I would like to believe that the phrase was not aimed at any one party. The pattern cuts across parties. The key issue was the architecture, not just who used it.

The Supreme Court struck down the scheme in February 2024 on the ground that it violated the right to information under Article 19(1)(a). The five-judge bench led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud ordered full disclosure. SBI first asked for more time and was refused. The data was published on 14–15 March 2024, with the pre-12-April-2019 sealed-cover data released on 17 March 2024. No replacement scheme has been notified.

What has happened since is that the three traditional substitutes have absorbed most of the redirected money. Direct corporate donations under the restored 7.5 per cent of the three-year average profit cap. Electoral trusts, dominated by the Prudent Electoral Trust, which leans towards the BJP. And renewed reliance on cash donations below the Rs 20,000 disclosure threshold. ADR’s preliminary work on the 2024-25 financial year suggests that the BJP’s share of declared donations to national parties has not narrowed relative to the Congress or any other political party in any meaningful way. The architecture survived. The instrument changed.

Beyond bonds lies the political consultancy industry. The most talked-about firm is the Indian Political Action Committee, or I-PAC, founded in 2013 as Citizens for Accountable Governance by Prashant Kishor and, since 2021, led by Pratik Jain after Kishor’s exit. I-PAC said its reach in the 2026 Bengal cycle was 8 crore individuals through 12 modules over two years. On 8 January 2026, the Enforcement Directorate searched ten I-PAC-linked locations in Delhi and Kolkata, including the CEO’s residence, in connection with the alleged Rs 2,700-crore West Bengal coal pilferage case. The scrutiny also involves a Rs 13.5 crore loan to the firm from a company that was not legally registered on the date of the transaction. Reports suggest I-PAC’s contract for the Samajwadi Party’s 2027 Uttar Pradesh campaign is now under strain.

Other consultancies operate in the same space. Sunil Kanugolu, a McKinsey alumnus who worked on Modi’s 2014 BJP campaign, has since worked with the DMK, the AIADMK, and the Congress in Karnataka, Telangana, and Maharashtra. He now works full-time within the Congress ecosystem. Showtime Consulting, founded by Robbin Sharrma, has worked with the TDP. Inclusive Minds, founded by Rishi Raj Singh, operates as an I-PAC offshoot. There are many such companies in India nowadays.

Here, to maintain full transparency, I must share with my blog readers that I also work with a similar consultancy, WarRoom Strategies, which competes directly with many of these companies in the Indian market.

These firms are paid by political parties from declared funds. But what they deliver, voter data analytics, micro-targeting infrastructure, narrative coordination, and candidate selection support, sits between conventional campaign work and the more opaque parts of the parallel economy.

Temple board revenues are the next layer. The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams approved a Rs 5,259 crore budget for the 2025-26 financial year. The Sabarimala temple in Kerala generated Rs 342 crore in its most recent reported fiscal year, with the Travancore Devaswom Board’s broader portfolio adding another Rs 164 crore. Shirdi Sai Sansthan crossed Rs 850 crore in 2024-25. Siddhivinayak in Mumbai crossed Rs 133 crore and is projected to cross Rs 154 crore in 2025-26. Vaishno Devi reported Rs 232 crore in 2023-24. Jagannath Puri’s budget was Rs 272 crore in 2023-24. These are revenues from real estate, gold, donations, and ticketed access. Aggregate state-controlled Hindu temple revenue across the country runs into several tens of thousands of crores, managed through state Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments departments in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Telangana.

The political relevance of these flows is not direct. Temple boards do not fund political parties. But the appointments to temple boards are political. The administration of religious revenue is political. The discretionary deployment of temple funds for development projects, infrastructure, festivals, and outreach is political. This is the part of the parallel economy where political and religious authority blend most completely.

Real estate, mining, and construction are the hardest sub-streams to map. Milan Vaishnav’s 2017 book, When Crime Pays, documented how candidates whose private interests lie in real estate and mining use both the political money and political muscle to protect those interests. Research by Sam Asher and Paul Novosad in the American Economic Journal, using econometric methods, showed that political connections can directly improve firm-level economic outcomes in closely fought Indian constituencies. The exact networks vary by state. The Reddy brothers’ iron-ore-political nexus in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Goa Mahadayi mining. Odisha bauxite and iron. Jharkhand coal under repeated ED scrutiny. Mumbai redevelopment under chronic ED attention. The total cash these networks circulate cannot reasonably be estimated with any confidence from public data.

And then there is the newest layer. The Assam 2026 election cycle produced the most fully integrated AI-augmented information operation yet documented in any Indian state election.

A Netherlands-based research collective called Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy published a 72-page audit on 6 April 2026 covering the run-up to the Assam vote. The audit identified 432 social media posts across Facebook and Instagram as very likely or likely AI-generated, using a 13-signal detection method. These posts generated 45.4 million views and over 100,000 likes. They were distributed through 273 coordinated accounts with a combined reach of over 407 million. One Instagram account, “politooons,” accounted for 88 per cent of all AI-content views, generating more than 40 million views across 102 AI-generated posts.

The campaign had a clear target. From November 2025 onward, BJP-aligned digital accounts, including the official BJP4Assam handle, systematically labelled Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi as “Paaijan,” a coded insult suggesting closeness to Pakistan. On 7 January 2026, the Assam BJP posted an AI-generated video showing Gogoi in a lungi and prayer cap meeting Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir. Around Republic Day, another AI-generated video circulated showing Gogoi reciting the Pakistani national anthem. Six AI-fabricated intimate videos targeted Gogoi’s wife, Elizabeth Colburn, in what the audit described as the first documented deepfake campaign targeting a political spouse in any Indian election.

This is the parallel economy in its most updated form. None of the spending on these operations appears in declared election expenditure. The accounts running the campaign are not registered political entities. The AI tools used are global commercial services available to anyone. The narrative operation is funded through the same opaque channels that have long funded the parallel economy. What is new is the technology layer on top.

To sum up this stream: what we can count already amounts to several lakh crores when you add religious institution revenues, post-bond corporate donations, and political consultancy revenues. What we cannot count, the real estate and mining nexuses, cash-for-coverage deals with media houses, influencer payments below disclosure limits, AI infrastructure, almost certainly adds at least as much again. The parallel economy is roughly the same size as the first three streams put together. It is also largely invisible.

The connecting tissue

Now, back to the original question we started with. What ties all four streams together?

Yamini Aiyar, who led the Centre for Policy Research between 2017 and 2024, has written widely on the structure of Indian welfare delivery. Her central argument is that India is moving from a welfare state organised around rights to one organised around what she calls beneficiary politics. In this model, the welfare system is not built to recognise citizens as rights-bearing individuals. It is built to identify beneficiaries who can be mobilised.

Aiyar draws on James C. Scott’s 1998 book Seeing Like a State, which explains how modern bureaucracies simplify human lives into legible categories so they can govern them. She argues that the Indian bureaucracy has done this specifically in the area of welfare. Aadhaar makes the citizen legible. Direct Benefit Transfer makes the beneficiary legible. Together, they create what Aiyar has called, in a recent conversation with CASI, a techno-patrimonial state: a modern infrastructure producing a pre-modern relationship between giver and receiver.

This is the connecting tissue.

The same Aadhaar number that authenticates a Lakshmir Bhandar payout also authenticates a voter on the electoral roll. The same Socio-Economic Caste Census deprivation indicator that helps determine MGNREGS (Now, rebranded as VB-G RAM G) eligibility can, in principle, be used by a campaign’s micro-targeting workflow. The same digital plumbing that disburses Orunodoi at Rs 678 crore a month also creates beneficiary lists, which become political mobilisation lists for the party in power.

The evidence here comes from research by LibTech India, a research collective based at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Rajendran Narayanan and his colleagues have been studying MGNREGS payment failures for nearly a decade. Their 2024 dataset documents a net deletion of 39 lakh MGNREGS payment accounts due to Aadhaar mismatch. About 27 per cent of active workers remain ineligible for the Aadhaar-Based Payment System. An ongoing study in Andhra Pradesh suggests that around 15 per cent of these deletions were wrongful. Net cumulative deletions over 21 months reached 7.6 crore workers.

This is the mirror image of the cash-transfer story. The same digital infrastructure that enables Lakshmir Bhandar to reach 2.4 crore women in West Bengal also quietly allows MGNREGS to delete 39 lakh accounts elsewhere. The same database that creates the beneficiary class can also quietly remove someone from it. The same digital system works in both directions.

What this means for the four money streams is that they are not separate. They are one architecture seen from four different angles. The branded cash transfer that pays a woman Rs 1,500 a month uses the same infrastructure that authenticates her vote. The CSR funds that support Vidya Bharati schools use the same legal-corporate structure as the Adani Foundation and the Tata Trusts. The CBC ads that brand a leader’s promise reach the same phone that receives the SMS confirming the welfare payment. The parallel economy that funds consultancies and AI operations sits atop all of this, paying for the narrative layer that links brand to recognition.

The citizen, the beneficiary, and the voter now sit in the same row of the same database. The political party that can reach that row most effectively wins.

What this leaves us with

Three closing observations.

The political money story in India has changed. It is no longer mainly about who donates to which party. It is about who can turn state machinery into political identity at scale. The Sangh’s voluntary infrastructure does this through service delivery built over generations. The Congress, the Left, and the regional parties cannot match it because they lack comparable infrastructure. State-funded welfare branding does it through digital cash transfers timed to elections. The megaphone amplifies it. The parallel economy pays for what the other three streams cannot legally support.

The Supreme Court closed the electoral bonds chapter in February 2024. But bonds were never the whole story. They were just one of four channels in a larger four-stream system. Closing one channel does not shut down the system. The other three streams have expanded to absorb what bonds once did.

And this architecture now has a name, even if it is not widely used yet: the techno-patrimonial state. Modern digital systems creating pre-modern political relationships. The infrastructure is universal. The mobilisation is partisan. The reader of this piece, the taxpayer whose money funds welfare schemes, government advertising, and cash transfers, is nothing but just a cog in a giant machine that now fuels Indian democracy.

Part 5 of this series will appear on 31 May and will discuss why the opposition has failed to consolidate even though 60 per cent of the vote remains available to them. Part 6 follows on 7 June.

Here you can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

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tushar(at)tusharpanchal(dot)co

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tushar(at)warroom(dot)live

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