Senior Congress leader, Kapil Sibal, who was among the 23 leaders who wrote an angry letter to the party president seeking organizational overhaul, has emerged as the biggest individual contributor to the party fund in FY 20. As per the ‘contribution report’ filed by the party treasurer Vinod Kumar Bansal to the Election Commission of India, the party has received above 20,000 rupees donation of the sum of 139 crore rupees, with Kapil Sibal, who contributed 3 crore rupees to the party fund, being the biggest individual donor.
The contribution report of Congress as well as of other parties can be accessed from the following link:
https://eci.gov.in/search/?q=contribution%20report&quick=1
In August last year, Sibal along with 22 other senior leaders including the likes of Anand Sharma and Shashi Tharoor, wrote a letter to the party president seeking organizational overhaul to make the party more relevant and competitive. It seems that Sibal, along with other influential colleagues who are not very loyal to the Gandhi family, is planning a coup in the party. With the influence of the millions of dollars that he earns from the law profession and other businesses, he is trying to buy the post of the party presidentship of the Indian National Congress.
On the corporate side, the biggest contributors were Prudent Electoral Trust, a fund primarily funded by Airtel India Limited, which contributed 31 crore rupees to the Congress party fund. ITC, the Kolkata-based multinational conglomerate was another major donor to the party fund with the parent company contributing 13 crore rupees while its subsidiaries ITC Infotech and Russell Credit Limited gave Rs 4 crore and Rs 1.4 crore respectively.
Many senior Congress leaders like Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh contributed 54,000 rupees each. Anand Sharma, Shashi Tharoor, Milind Deora, Ghulam Nabi Azad – leaders who were part of Group of 23 who signed the organizational overhaul letter, also contributed 54,000 rupees each.
Kapil Sibal is among the top lawyers of the Supreme Court of India and has represented many colourful clients such as PFI, IUML, Saradha Sacm Accused, Sunni Waqf Board, All India Muslims Personal law board and so on. Kapil Sibal represented the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) – an offshoot of All India Muslim League, the party responsible for Partition of the country – in the apex court in its plea against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, which seeks to provide Indian citizenship to members of minority communities in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh that have fled religious persecution.
Sibal earns crores by representing colorful clients who are usually on the wrong side of the story, and with the influence of this money, he now wants to buy the party presidentship.
In the last few months, Sibal has consistently voiced his anger against the top leadership of the party. When the letter written by 23 senior leaders was not discussed in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet, he said, “That is the fundamental thing that should have happened. This is what these 23 people have written. If you find fault with any of what we have written, then, surely, we can be questioned and we should be questioned…But if you don’t talk of substance and talk of either timing or the fact that we wrote, that itself is an example of distancing yourself from the cause. And that has what has happened. Not one request of ours, a concern of ours, reflected in the letter has been sought to be addressed in that meeting. Not one. Yet we are called dissenters,”
He also added, “in the course of the (CWC) meeting we were called traitors and nobody sitting in that meeting including the leadership told them that this is not the kind of language.”
Sibal is not only uniting all the leaders who are against the monopoly of Gandhis over the party high command but also using his financial leverage to make the best attempts to install himself over the party president post.