Progressive Trust Or Regressive Politics? What Is Inside Tata’s Mega-Donation To BJP?

On a brisk late-winter day in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet convened to make a landmark decision. It was February 29, 2024, a leap day laden with promise, and the government approved a multi-billion-dollar push to build India’s domestic semiconductor industry. Two of the three new chip-making projects went to the Tata Group, with the Union Cabinet agreeing to underwrite half the cost of Tata’s ventures, which was a subsidy of roughly ₹44,203 crore (about $5.3 billion).

The ink was barely dry on that approval when, just four weeks later, an even more astonishing figure emerged in an entirely different ledger. On April 2, 2024, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received a ₹758 crore “donation” from companies of the Tata empire, making the Tata Group far and away the BJP’s largest benefactor on the eve of India’s general elections.

Veteran lawyer and transparency activist Prashant Bhushan did not mince words about this windfall. “Bribery!” he pronounced publicly, implying that the timing of Tata’s generosity was more than just coincidence. Indeed, the juxtaposition of a massive state subsidy and a massive political contribution, within the span of one month, has raised pointed questions across the nation.

Was this simply corporate patriotism and confidence in the BJP’s economic vision? Or was it a quid pro quo in plain sight, a legal bribe dressed up as a donation? 

Money Trail: From Tata’s Trust to BJP’s Coffers

The ₹758 crore that landed in the BJP’s account did not come in an envelope of cash or a briefcase of illicit bills. It travelled via a sanctioned, if opaque channel of political funding known as an electoral trust. In this case, the vehicle was the Progressive Electoral Trust (PET), an entity controlled by the Tata Group. On paper, an electoral trust is a neutral financial intermediary where companies and individuals donate to the trust, and the trust in turn disburses funds to political parties, ostensibly without direction from the original donors.

The system, introduced in 2013 to promote transparency, requires trusts to publicly report their receipts and payouts to the Election Commission. In practice, however, these trusts often serve as conduits for corporate political preferences, and in PET’s case, the preferences could not be clearer.

According to official disclosure reports, 15 Tata Group firms, including blue-chip names like Tata Sons, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Steel, Tata Motors and others contributed a total of ₹915 crore to the Progressive Electoral Trust on a single day, i.e., April 2, 2024. That same day, PET dutifully distributed ₹914.9 crore to ten political parties. The largest slice, ₹757.6 crore, went to the BJP, amounting to an incredible 82% of the trust’s total payouts.

The principal opposition, the Indian National Congress, received a comparatively paltry ₹77.3 crore. 8 other parties, from regional powerhouses like the Trinamool Congress and DMK to smaller players got ₹10 crore each as a token gesture of balance. In effect, virtually all of Tata’s trust donations were channelled to the ruling party.

The sheer scale of Tata’s 2024 contribution is unprecedented in recent Indian political history. It instantly became the single largest political donation disclosed for the 2023-24 period, dwarfing every other known corporate donation that year. For context, the BJP’s total receipts from all electoral trusts in 2024-25 was about ₹959 crore, so the Tata-controlled PET accounted for roughly 79% of that sum. By contrast, Congress, which the Tata trust also donated to, received just ₹313 crore via all trusts combined in that year. Clearly, it seems that Tata’s money had a colour, and it was saffron.

It is worth noting that the Progressive Electoral Trust is not a new creation; it has existed for about a decade, and Tata has used it before. Back in 2018-19, during the last Lok Sabha election cycle, PET similarly gathered funds from Tata companies and gave about ₹454 crore to parties, of which ₹356 crore (75%) went to the BJP. In other words, Tata was the BJP’s biggest corporate donor in 2018-19 as well, albeit at roughly half the magnitude of the 2024 payout.

What’s striking is what happened in the interim years, or rather, what didn’t happen. Between 2014 and 2017, the Progressive trust lay dormant, reporting no donations at all. In 2019-20, its filings went missing from public records, and between 2021 and early 2024 it once again registered zero contributions to any party. That pattern isn’t an accident, as we shall see; it mirrors a dramatic shift in how India’s political finance system works, especially for those who prefer to operate in the shadows.

Semiconductor Subsidies and Sudden Generosity

The timing of Tata’s ₹758 crore donation has set tongues wagging and alarm bells ringing in equal measure. Let’s rewind to that Cabinet meeting on Feb 29, 2024. The government’s approval that day wasn’t just a routine policy decision, but it was a greenlight for Tata’s big bet on semiconductors, complete with an eye-popping ₹44,000+ crore incentive package from the central exchequer. Tata Sons’ semiconductor subsidiaries were cleared to build two cutting-edge facilities: a chip fabrication plant in Dholera, Gujarat (in partnership with Taiwan’s Powerchip), and an assembly-testing-packaging unit in Assam.

Both states were governed by the BJP, and both projects came with the government footing 50% of the bill, tens of thousands of crores in subsidies, to foster a domestic chip industry. It was a red-letter day for the Tata Group’s ambitions, giving them a dominant position in an emerging sector, substantially de-risked by public funds.

Now fast-forward one month. It is early April 2024, just days before the General Election code of conduct kicks in. The Tata Group, fresh from securing those semiconductor deals, suddenly opens its purse strings to shower the ruling party with by far the largest corporate donation India has ever seen. “Just weeks after these approvals… Tata Group donated ₹758 crore to the BJP,” notes an Election Commission report, which flagged the uncanny sequence of subsidy-then-donation.

The implication of a quid pro quo was not lost on observers. “Critics have questioned whether the sequence of approvals and donations signals an indirect quid pro quo”, even if no one has proven an explicit deal. The optics alone is a huge check following huge favours; were enough to prompt talk of crony capitalism and “pay-to-play” politics.

To be clear, no laws appear to have been broken. The donation was made transparently in accordance with election finance rules, and the government subsidy was part of a stated national mission to promote chip manufacturing. But in politics, the difference between legal and ethical can be stark. The absence of a smoking gun contract saying “money for favors” does little to dispel the stench of opportunism. When asked about the timing of the contribution, both Tata Sons and the Ministry of Electronics (which oversees the semiconductor program) remained tellingly silent. Silence, in this case, speaks volumes.

Tata’s windfall to the BJP also fits into a larger pattern in the nascent semiconductor sector. Consider the Murugappa Group, a Chennai-based conglomerate that snagged the third semiconductor project approved in that same February 29 meeting. It too benefitted from a 50% subsidy (₹3,501 crore) for its chip unit. And just days after getting the government’s nod, Murugappa quietly donated ₹125 crore to the BJP, a massive spike compared to its meager political donations in prior years.

Another example is Kaynes Technology, whose managing director gave ₹12 crore to the BJP in 2023-24, and a few months later Kaynes Semicon Private Limited received approval to set up a semiconductor unit in Gujarat. Coincidence? Perhaps, but when coincidences start piling up like this, they begin to resemble a trend. Analysts note a broader pattern across industries where companies “increase political contributions following government incentives,” effectively leveraging policy wins into party donations. It’s a development that ought to worry anyone concerned about the integrity of policymaking.

Even beyond semiconductors, Tata Group’s newfound political largesse in 2024 raised eyebrows because it was so at odds with the group’s recent behaviour. For years, Tata had not been a big direct donor in politics, at least not openly. The group has long cultivated an image of ethical conduct; Ratan Tata, the patriarch who led the conglomerate for decades, famously recounted how he once walked away from the aviation business rather than pay a ₹15 crore bribe to a minister. “I did not want to go to bed knowing I had set up an airline by paying a bribe,” Ratan Tata said of that 1990s incident.

Such statements burnished Tata’s reputation for integrity. Yet here we are in 2024, witnessing the Tata Group effectively writing an eight-hundred-crore cheque to the ruling party. The irony is palpable: a group that once eschewed a ₹15 crore kickback on principle now finds itself contributing 50 times that sum to the BJP’s coffers, just as it lands a jackpot of state support.

Bonds, Trusts, and the Game of Political Funding

To fully grasp why Tata’s donation saga unfolded the way it did, one must understand the evolving landscape of political finance in India. Two words are key: Electoral Bonds. Introduced in 2018 by the Modi government, electoral bonds were a controversial instrument that allowed businesses and individuals to donate unlimited funds to political parties anonymously, through bearer bonds encashed via banks. The ruling BJP pitched bonds as a reform to cleanse cash from politics, but in reality, they became a byword for institutionalized opacity.

Between 2018 and 2023, over ₹16,500 crore flowed into party coffers through these secretive bonds, with the BJP cornering the lion’s share of this money. Indeed, by 2023 the BJP was regularly the overwhelming beneficiary of bond donations, far outstripping any other party’s haul. In 2023-24 alone, the BJP received a whopping ₹1,685 crore via electoral bonds, a staggering war chest built largely out of public sight.

The Tata Group was notably quiet during the electoral bond era. Recall that the Progressive Electoral Trust essentially went dark from 2019 through 2023. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess why there was no need to use the trust when electoral bonds offered an even stealthier pipeline. Companies could support their preferred party without any disclosure at all. If Tata or its subsidiaries donated to the BJP via bonds in those years, the public would have no direct way of knowing. And given the BJP’s dominance in bond receipts, it is widely suspected that many major corporate houses, Tata included, shifted their political giving into the opaque bond channel to avoid scrutiny.

One could call electoral bonds a form of “legalized bribery”; legal, because it’s allowed by law; bribery, because the source and motive of the funds are concealed, eroding accountability. The Supreme Court itself eventually took that view. In a landmark judgment in February 2024, the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional and dangerously non-transparent. The justices essentially agreed with what civil society groups had long argued that electoral bonds were undermining democracy by enabling payoffs behind closed doors.

So when bonds were invalidated mere weeks before the 2024 elections, how did big donors respond? Tata’s case provides the answer. The money didn’t stop; it simply rerouted back into electoral trusts, which are slightly more transparent. The Election Commission’s records for 2024-25 reveal that despite the bonds ban, the BJP “barely felt the heat”: it remained the top recipient under the old trust system. As noted, the BJP collected ₹959 crore via electoral trusts in that year, and Tata’s Progressive Trust alone accounted for 83% of it.

Other corporate-backed trusts, like one run by the Mahindra Group, contributed smaller amounts (₹150 crore from Mahindra’s New Democratic Trust, for example). The net effect was that even without bonds, money found a way to reach the ruling party, albeit with a few more breadcrumbs for the public (and investigative journalists) to follow. If electoral bonds were a black box, electoral trusts are a dimly lit room; not fully transparent, but not pitch dark either. In Tata’s case, those breadcrumbs led to the blockbuster revelation we’re examining.

It’s important to emphasize that electoral trusts still obscure a lot. They disclose the total amounts given by each donor and the total given to each party, but not which donor’s rupee went to which party. In the Tata trust’s disclosures, we see Tata Sons gave ₹308 crore, TCS ₹217.6 crore, Tata Steel ₹173 crore, Tata Motors ₹49.4 crore, Tata Power ₹39.5 crore, Tata Communications ₹14.8 crore, and so on – all on April 2, 2024. We also see that BJP got ₹757.6 crore, Congress ₹77.3 crore, and each of eight regional parties got ₹10 crore.

What we don’t see is, for example, whether Tata Sons’ ₹308 crore was entirely passed to BJP or partly to others. In theory, the trust could claim it pooled all donations and then decided distribution independently. In practice, common sense and patterns suggest that when one conglomerate’s companies are the sole contributors (as with PET), the distribution likely reflects the donor’s intent. Tata didn’t have to explicitly earmark “BJP only” – the trust’s managers knew where the group’s bread is buttered, and acted accordingly. This plausible deniability is built into the system.

The upshot is that Tata’s immense contribution became public only because the legal cover of electoral bonds fell away. Had bonds still been in play in April 2024, one can reasonably conjecture that ₹758 crore would have been routed through anonymous bonds instead, and the country would be none the wiser. Ironically, by striking down bonds, the Supreme Court inadvertently forced political money into slightly more open channels, allowing this startling case of potential pay-for-play to surface in the daylight. What we do with this information – whether we treat it as “business as usual” or demand systemic changes – is another question.

Crony Capitalism or Genuine Support?

From the BJP’s perspective, they can argue nothing illegal transpired; they simply received a generous donation from a major industrial group, one that has also given (albeit much smaller amounts) to opposition parties. Indeed, BJP leaders often defend corporate donations by casting them as expressions of ideology or approval of the government’s policies.

Why shouldn’t businesses support a pro-growth party?, they might ask. In this narrative, Tata’s funding could be seen as a vote of confidence in the BJP’s stewardship of the economy and its commitment to industrial development (semiconductors included). It’s also pointed out that Tata Group has donated to parties across the spectrum – the PET did give ₹77 crore to Congress and ₹10 crore each to multiple regional parties, after all. Could this simply indicate that Tata hedged its bets, but weighted them toward the expected winner?

Critics aren’t buying that explanation, and they have good reason to be skeptical. For one, the proportions speak volumes: 82% to BJP, 8% to Congress, and token 1% slices to eight others is hardly a balanced portfolio of political philanthropy. It looks more like a calculated investment in influence, with a bit of “compliance money” sprinkled to others for appearance’s sake.

Crony capitalism is the term that comes to mind; where private companies and government actors exchange favours in a tight embrace, often at the expense of the public interest. The opposition has seized on the Tata case as a prime example of the blurring of lines between state policy and ruling party gain. One Congress spokesperson quipped that the BJP’s “Make in India” slogan has effectively become “Make it rain in India – for the BJP’s election fund.” The quip may be exaggerated, but the underlying concern is real: If policies as crucial as semiconductor investments are perceived to be entangled with political donations, public trust in those decisions erodes.

Transparency advocates and former Election Commission officials have expressed dismay at how starkly the Tata donation lays bare the influence of money in politics. This is essentially legal corruption, argued one activist, noting that just because something is done by the rulebook doesn’t mean it isn’t corrosive to democracy. Prashant Bhushan’s one-word verdict – “Bribery!” – resonates here. The Supreme Court’s scrapping of electoral bonds was supposed to curb the worst excesses of secret corporate funding, but Tata’s workaround through an electoral trust shows that without deeper reforms (like caps on donations or truly independent oversight), the game finds a new way to play on**.

It is also instructive to recall that even within the BJP’s own ranks, not everyone views the Tata Group as saintly. Firebrand BJP MP Subramanian Swamy has in the past lambasted Tata’s leadership, calling Ratan Tata “the most corrupt chairman in [the] history of the Tata Group” and alleging the conglomerate’s involvement in scandals from the 2G telecom scam to shady AirAsia aviation deals.

Swamy’s crusades are often politically charged, but his accusations underscore that Tata is not universally regarded as a white knight of industry – and that was before this massive political payout. In light of the ₹758 crore episode, one might wryly ask: If Ratan Tata’s actions were under such suspicion, what would Swamy make of Tata funneling hundreds of crores to his own party? Is it “corruption”, or just the new normal of financing power in India?

Conclusion: A Wake-Up Call

The tale of Tata’s ₹758 crore political contribution is a masterclass in the subtleties of modern influence-peddling. It involves no briefcases of cash changing hands in five-star hotel rooms, no blatant illegal kickbacks. Instead, it’s all done through boardroom decisions, government orders, and a few notarized papers filed with the Election Commission. It’s sanitized, almost sterile – yet, at its core, it may be as corrosive to democratic ideals as any outright scam. The brazenness of it – that such a huge sum can move from a private conglomerate to a ruling party right after a policy favour – should serve as a wake-up call.

What can be done? For starters, the full enforcement of transparency in political funding is non-negotiable. The Supreme Court’s verdict against electoral bonds was a step in the right direction. Now, bolstered by cases like Tata’s, there are calls to further tighten the screws: impose caps on how much one company or group can donate, mandate real-time disclosures (so that voters know before they vote who’s funding whom), and empower regulators to investigate suspicious timing or patterns of donations.

There’s also a case for revisiting the decision that allowed corporate donations to be unlimited and even from foreign-controlled companies (a 2017 change in law that removed previous restrictions). Without such checks, “donations” risk becoming nothing but down-payments for future political favors.

For the Tata Group, which cherishes its legacy as a nation-builder and a principled business house, this episode is a blot. No amount of press releases about nation-building or philanthropy can quite undo the image of India’s biggest corporate house apparently currying favour with the party in power through astronomical donations. The group’s leadership would do well to reflect on whether this short-term influence is worth the long-term dent in credibility. If nothing else, Tata should remember that governments change – and today’s ruling party could be tomorrow’s opposition, with a long memory of who bankrolled whom.

As citizens and readers, we should not let stories like this numb us into cynicism, but rather galvanize us into seeking change. Every democracy has to grapple with the nexus of money and politics; India is at a crossroads where it must decide if it will confront this nexus or allow it to become hopelessly entrenched.

The 2024 Tata-BJP donation saga is more than just a headline about one conglomerate and one party – it is a mirror held up to the Republic, challenging us to look squarely at how power really operates. And unless we like what we see, it’s incumbent upon us – through civic pressure, the ballot box, or judicial intervention – to demand a system where policies aren’t sold and politicians aren’t bought, at any price.