Obscure offices, mystery donors: The hidden empire of India’s shadow parties

A small basement in a residential house. A tiny rented room in a commercial complex. A road safety equipment shop. 

These unlikely addresses belong to three political parties that together received a staggering Rs 375 crore in political donations over the last five years.

That’s just the tip of an iceberg.

These are among the 10 unrecognised parties with the highest donations. 

Despite any substantial public presence or electoral performance, they collectively received over Rs 3,014 crore in political donations during this period. That’s more than double the amount received by the country’s main opposition party Congress, which declared Rs 1,225 crore in donations in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in 2023–24.

Though none of these parties are recognised political entities. 

They fall under the category of registered unrecognised political parties (RUPPs) – a classification in India’s electoral system for political parties that are registered with the Election Commission of India but fail to meet the criteria required for recognition as either a state or national party. These criteria mandate that a group must either win a minimum percentage of valid votes polled or secure a certain number of seats in an assembly or Lok Sabha election. There are 2,764 such RUPPs in India.

RUPPs are legally entitled to accept donations from individuals and corporate entities under Section 29B of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. They cannot receive foreign donations under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010. And they enjoy income tax exemptions under Section 13A of the Income Tax Act, 1961 – provided they submit annual returns and disclose contributions above Rs 20,000 to the ECI.

However, many such parties have opaque financial activities. 

Consider most of the cases among these top 10 recipients. 

What audit reports and contribution reports suggest

Newslaundry looked at the audit reports that detail expenditures for all these 10 parties: Prabal Bharat Party, Rashtriya Vikas Party, Saurashtra Janta Paksha, Aam Janmat Party, Bhartiya National Janta Dal, Jan Man Party, Jan Sevak Kranti Party, New India United Party, Public Political Party and Satyawadi Rakshak Party.

Despite receiving hundreds of crores in donations, their public and political activities remain seemingly invisible. They rarely contest elections, and when they do, it’s with negligible voter support and minimal expenditure. In fact, a review of their audit reports suggests that over 90 percent of their declared expenditure is listed vaguely as “social welfare” or “administrative expenses”, with no detailed breakdown of how or where the money was spent.

We also looked at the contribution reports – that detail sources of donations, unlike financial reports that detail expenses – for seven of them and found several discrepancies. Such reports could not be reviewed for three parties since they could not be digitised. These three were the Prabal Bharat Party, Rashtriya Vikas Party and Saurashtra Janta Paksha.

Except the Public Political Party and Jan Sevak Kranti Party, the remaining eight are now under investigation by the Income Tax Department, for suspected financial irregularities and possible misuse of political funding routes.

But who are the people behind these parties? How do they function? And where does all the money really go? Are they really the B team of BJP as Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi once claimed?

Our investigation found no direct link between these smaller parties and either the BJP or the Congress. Their social media profiles showed no formal ties to either national party. 

But tracing the money proved difficult. 

Rs 200 crore for party run from basement

Mahesh Pratap Sharma runs the Rashtriya Vikas Party from the basement of his kothi in Faridabad’s Ashoka Enclave. An Indian Air Force veteran, Sharma founded the party in the early 2000s and operates it from his home, which doubles as the registered office.

Finding the office is no easy task. Despite being the official address, it sits inside a quiet residential colony with only a small board on the gate to mark its existence.

Inside, the garage has been converted into a basic workspace – a table, a few chairs, a desktop, and a printer. A staffer sits there, coordinating meetings with Sharma, who works in the basement below.

Downstairs, Sharma occupies a sparsely furnished room with a large table. Behind him hangs a poster of himself in what appears to be a naval uniform – a reminder of his military past, which comes up repeatedly in conversation.

“Our party’s motto is ‘Pledge to Rescue and Restore India,’” he tells Newslaundry.

Sharma traces his political ambitions to the Khalistan movement in Punjab. After leaving the Air Force, he ran a private detective agency called Sharma Detective and a security firm, SPIS Security. “Both were large-scale operations. Our main clients for SPIS were in Punjab, which was facing serious unrest due to Khalistani elements. We provided security – particularly to factories owned by Hindus. We had around 100 to 150 armed guards deployed across the state."

He claims the state government resisted their activities, citing that security is a state subject. This opposition, he says, led to the formation of a Hindu Rashtriya Sangh aimed at “protecting Hindus”.

“During that period, I even met Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who invited me to join the BJP,” Sharma recalls. “But people in my organisation didn’t want me to leave. So after discussions, we decided to form our own party.”

He insists the Rashtriya Vikas Party emerged from that decision and claims the party only contests Lok Sabha elections, boasting of success in the early 2000s. “We had two MPs during Vajpayee’s time… but since then, we haven’t been able to win. Elections have become too expensive. You need at least Rs 20 crore to win these days. Where would we get such a huge amount?”

The facts tell a different story. Newslaundry found no record of the party winning any seats since its 2004 debut. That year, it fielded five candidates – all lost. Four polled less than 0.1 percent of the vote. Sharma himself contested from Aligarh, securing just 403 votes.

The party’s presence shrank further in subsequent elections. It fielded only one candidate each time – Sharma himself. In 2009, he contested Aligarh again and polled 584 votes. In 2014 and 2019, he contested Mathura, polling around 2,300 votes each time. In 2024, he contested Faridabad and polled 1,240 votes.

While Sharma complains about the role of money in elections and claims small parties like his struggle to survive, the data suggests otherwise. His party has received Rs 207 crore in political donations over the past five years despite its dismal performance.

These figures caught the attention of authorities. In July 2025, the Income Tax Department raided Sharma’s residence-cum-party headquarters in Faridabad. The operation lasted over 12 hours, with officials seizing laptops, phones, financial documents, and digital records. Simultaneous searches were conducted at the homes and offices of the party’s chartered accountants in Delhi and Mumbai.

The raids reportedly targeted suspected irregularities in election funding, with officials investigating the source and routing of approximately Rs 200 crore in political donations.

Sharma’s Rashtriya Vikas Party had stood at the fifth position in the list of top 10 RUPPs in terms of donations between 2019 and 2024, according to analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms.

Gujarat’s Bharatiya National Janata Dal topped the list with donations worth Rs 957 crore, followed by New India United Party (Rs 608 crore) and Satyawadi Rakshak Party (Rs 418 crore). But these parties have been inconsistent in sharing their financial statements or details of their donors. 

The top 10 

Such inconsistencies make it harder to investigate the money trail and violates the EC’s 2014 guidelines on “Transparency and Accountability in party funds and election expenditure”. 

These guidelines mandate that all political parties maintain proper books of accounts as per standards prescribed by the Institute of Chartered Accounts of India (ICAI). The guidelines also require parties to submit annual audit reports and contribution reports to State Chief Electoral Officers. These should be uploaded to state CEO websites within three days for public viewing.

Yet the ADR audit found that in 2022-23, only 26.7 percent of unrecognised parties across 22 states had filed either audit or contribution reports.

For instance, New India United Party and Satyawadi Rakshak Party did not file their statements for three consecutive years – 2019 to 2021. 

Additionally, there were some cases like the Aam Janmat Party, which shared its income statement without the donor details. In 2022–23, the Aam Janmat Party received the second-highest amount in political donations – Rs 220 crore. However, in its contribution report, the party disclosed donor details – such as date, amount, name, PAN, and address – for only Rs 21 crore worth of donations. 

There was no disclosure of the donor identity for the remaining 95 percent – Rs 199 crore. Against such donors, their name and PAN details were simply marked as “N/A”, or not available. And these were big donors, who donated more than Rs 20,000 to the party – a violation of the EC’s norms which mandate parties to disclose big donors.

The party did not disclose the mode of donation for each entry, making it difficult to investigate whether the party had received donations of over Rs 20,000 in cash or not. As per the ECI guidelines on transparency and accountability, payment of over Rs 20,000 in cash is prohibited. 

Similarly, Jan Man Party did not share the reference numbers – either online transaction IDs or physical payment identifiers such as cheque numbers or DD numbers – for transactions by donors worth Rs 133 crore between 2021 to 2024. 

The New India United Party did not disclose the mode of contributions for donations amounting to a staggering Rs 407 crore in 2022. They began sharing this information in subsequent years – when their donations dropped to nearly half. 

The Prabal Bharat Party, meanwhile, merely listed “online” as the mode of donation for contributions totaling around Rs 102 crore between 2021 and 2023, without any further details. 

The Public Political Party failed to provide both the mode of transaction and reference numbers for the year 2022. In 2023, they listed the mode of donation for an amount worth Rs 33 crore as “online” without sharing reference numbers. 

The Satyawadi Party also withheld reference numbers for the year 2022.

There may be more discrepancies in the sheets as our analysis is based on 10 of the 24 donation contribution lists submitted by these 10 parties to the EC. Newslaundry could digitise these 10 lists. The rest could not be digitised as they were either blurred PDFs or non-machine readable – a document where text is not encoded in a way that software can recognise, search, select, copy or extract directly. 

Gujarat-based parties had the highest number of common donors – as seen in common PANs. Three parties with the highest donations – the New India United Party, Bharatiya National Janata Dal and Satyawadi Rakshak Party – were all Gujarat-based.

The New India United Party and Bharatiya National Janata Dal shared the maximum number of common donors –  35 – who donated a total of Rs 1.94 crore to both parties. 

The Bharatiya National Janata Dal and Satyawadi Rakshak Party had 14 common donors who gave Rs 79.7 lakh in total.

The New India United Party and Satyawadi Rakshak Party got Rs 31 lakh from 11 common donors.

There are actually 119 such common donors who have donated a total of Rs 6.2 crore to at least two parties.

Rs 100 crore at a road safety equipment shop

Jan Sewak Kranti Party received Rs 100 crore in donations over three years. Its registered office in Gurugram? A road safety equipment shop.

When Newslaundry visited, the shopkeeper denied knowing anything about a political party. But as we were leaving, he called his employer, who admitted over the phone that yes, he ran the party, and yes, he used the shop’s address as the registered office.

“We shifted our office to a new location. But currently I am not available, can you come some other day?” the owner, identified as Ankit Alagh, told Newslaundry over the phone. 

JSKP was formed in September 2021, and its foray into politics began in 2024.

In the Lok Sabha polls, Vijay Yadav contested from Gurgaon, while Ankit Alagh himself entered the Haryana assembly race from the same constituency. The party fielded two other candidates – Lucky Balmiki (Rania) and Vicky (Gharaunda) – for the assembly polls.

The debut was dismal: none of the candidates managed to secure even 0.1 percent of the vote share.

Yet the party’s 2023-24 balance sheet shows Rs 56.62 crore in donations. Of this, Rs 55.5 crore went to “administrative expenses”: Rs 18.74 crore on “food and events,” Rs 8.16 crore on “public rallies,” Rs 6.87 crore on “ration distribution,” Rs 4.58 crore on "advertisement and promotion”, Rs 3.6 crore for “catering and tenting”, and Rs 4.9 crore for “tour and meeting”.

Election campaigning? Just Rs 1.18 crore.

Here’s the kicker: Of the Rs 35.2 crore received in 2022-23, over 50 percent came in March 2023 alone. And the highest number of transactions occurred on March 31, 2023 – one day before the new financial year began. In 118 transactions on that single day, the party received Rs 2.37 crore.

Over 96 percent of the party’s donations – amounting to more than Rs 31 crore – were made via “bank transfers”, with the remainder contributed through cheques. However, the party did not disclose the reference numbers for these donations.

While the highest number of donors came from Delhi, followed by Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Punjab, the Haryana-based party got money from other parts of the country too, including Karnataka and Telangana.

A party to uplift Savarna

Behind V3S Mall in east Delhi, in a cramped room in the Laxmi Deep commercial complex, sits the Public Political Party. No signboard. Just the party name scrawled on the door.

Inside, Lokesh Srivastava, the founding president, explains his mission: “Our agenda is to uplift Savarnas.”

Formed in 2011, PPP has contested “at least 20 elections”. Wins? Zero. “We have hardly received 1,000 votes so far,” Srivastava admits. “But it doesn’t matter. Our focus is not votes but candidates – and pushing our Savarna ideology...we are planning at least five seats in Bihar.”

On funding, he gestures to documents. “The last ITR we filed was about Rs 35 crore. This year our target is Rs 100 crore.” He claims it all goes to candidates and organising events.

What do the documents suggest?

The party did not disclose the reference numbers and addresses of its donors in the documents it submitted from 2019 to 2022. In 2021, it reported Rs 9.4 crore in donations but gave limited details, for only Rs 6.1 crore.

The tiny office is partitioned into three sections: a cabin for his wife Deep Mala Srivastava, the party’s current national president; a waiting area for visitors; and a staff room with a few computers.

Reluctant to discuss his past before politics, Srivastava steered the conversation back to his movement for upper castes. “Please write down what we all have done: We demonstrated to form a Savarna Ayog, a seven-month-long dharna for 51 percent reservation,” he said.

Srivastava claims, “We select our candidates a year in advance. They get funds to build their teams – some paid, some unpaid. In some places we have to organise feasts. Whatever donations we receive, all of it goes to our candidates…There are tents and flags for dharnas, and we also pay full-time workers based on their capability.”

But PPP’s own filings before the Election Commission paint a different picture. Its audited accounts for 2023–24 show donations of Rs 33.21 crore, of which only Rs 4.55 crore was declared as election expenditure. The bulk – Rs 25.03 crore – was spent under “other administrative expenses.”

The party claimed to have spent Rs 6.01 crore on “meeting expenses”, Rs 4.7 crore on “public interaction”, and Rs 3.96 crore on surveys. It also reported Rs 2.91 crore on “office party expenses”, Rs 1.59 crore on entertainment, Rs 1.93 crore on travel, and Rs 1.14 crore on volunteer expenses. Rent was pegged at just Rs 17 lakh.

PPP further declared Rs 1.02 crore on staff salaries and Rs 56 lakh on staff welfare. Yet, during Newslaundry’s visit, the office housed only three employees, alongside Srivastava and his wife.

‘It’s all legal’

Of these 10 parties with the largest donations, at least eight have been investigated by the income tax department. 

Sources confirmed all five Gujarat-based parties have faced surveys.

In September, the Income Tax Department in Jharkhand launched a major investigation into over 50 chartered accountants suspected of facilitating widespread tax evasion by routing political donations through the Aam Janmat Party. These professionals allegedly claimed exemptions under Section 80GGC by ‘donating’ money to the party, which then returned the funds after deducting a five percent cut from  every donation, often using various channels.

In July, Rashtriya Vikas Party’s office was also raided by the Income Tax Department in Faridabad. In August, a 20-member Income Tax team conducted a raid at the home of advocate Dilip Mishra, national president of Bharat Prabal Party in Bihar’s Sitamarhi. The officers reportedly spent six hours searching, seizing jewelry, real estate documents, bank passbooks, and other financial records, then extended their operation to Mishra’s poultry farm and the house of his chartered accountant.

Notably, most of the donations to these parties came from individuals. When Newslaundry reached out to a dozen of them, many neither confirmed nor denied making such contributions. 

In numerous cases, the donors’ addresses listed in party filings were vague or incomplete; in others, they turned out to be outdated, with current occupants saying the named individuals had moved away years ago. One Delhi-based donor, who admitted to contributing, told Newslaundry that he was asked to route money through the party as a way to save on income tax.

However, the parties insist donations are an essential part of political functioning.

Surendra Kumar Gajera, national president of the Bharatiya National Janata Dal, dismissed concerns. “Every big political party, Congress and BJP, gets huge donations. But you have no problem with them. We get Rs 956 crore and suddenly you have a problem. We provide all details – contribution reports, audit reports, everything. It’s all legal. We have a presence in states like Kerala and have even fielded candidates in Assam. But questions are always asked of us,” he said.

“We have not done anything wrong. Everything is legal. We are even more transparent than any mainstream political party,” Gajera insisted, adding that his party’s ideology revolves around farmers. “We are focused on farmers. Whenever we win, we will prioritise them. We start from the poor and want to reach the middle class – not the rich.”

Shakti Upadhyay, president of the Saurashtra Janta Paksha, struck a similar note. “We have transparently shown what we received and how we spent it. Despite that, we are facing the wrath,” he said.

Newslaundry mailed a questionnaire to all the parties named in this report except Jan Man Party and Satyawadi Rakshak Party. Phone calls to the former remained unanswered while the contact details of the latter were not publicly available.

Multiple phone calls to the New India United Party, Satyawadi Rakshak Party, Aam Janmat Party and Jan Man Party remained unanswered.

EC action

The Election Commission of India has repeatedly delisted registered unrecognised political parties. In 2022, it marked 253 RUPPs as “inactive” for failing to contest elections within six years of registration and for not fulfilling their statutory obligations – submitting an annual audit report, contribution report, and election expenditure details.

In 2025, the ECI went a step further, delisting 345 RUPPs. As a result, these parties lost the privilege of fielding candidates under a common election symbol.

While the commission can delist parties as “inactive”, it does not have the power to de-register a political party. However, failure to submit the mandatory financial reports can lead to the withdrawal of income tax exemptions. The EC can also forward individual cases to the Central Board of Direct Taxes for investigation.

Newslaundry reached out to the EC seeking a response on the course of action for parties that do not comply with its transparency norms. We also mailed questions to the income tax department about the status of the investigation against many of these companies. This report will be updated if a response is received.

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