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.
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