The Congress party revealed to the Election Commission of India (ECI) that Rahul Gandhi, the party’s leader, received ₹1.40 crore in total to run for two seats in the Lok Sabha in 2024. The party alleged that Gandhi received ₹70 lakh apiece for running in the Wayanad and Raebareli general elections.
Rahul Gandhi managed to hold onto his seat in Uttar Pradesh despite winning in both Wayanad and Raebareli. The Congress national secretary, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, is the party’s nominee in the upcoming bypolls in Wayanad.
Despite being Congress’ star campaigner for the Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi was not the party leader who got the highest amount to contest the polls. The only Congress candidate to get a higher amount was Vikramaditya Singh, who was given ₹87 lakh from the party fund.
Singh contested the elections from Mandi constituency seat in Himachal Pradesh, but lost the polls to actor-politician Kangana Ranaut from the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Other leaders to get ₹70 lakh included Kishori Lal Sharma, who defeated BJP’s sitting MP Smriti Irani, K C Venugopal (Alappuzha in Kerala) and Manickam Tagore (Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu). Radhakrishna and Vijay Inder Singla – Congress candidates from Gulbarga in Karnataka and Anandpur Sahib in Punjab, respectively – also got ₹70 lakh each.
Meanwhile, senior party leaders Anand Sharma and Digvijay Singh got ₹46 lakh and ₹50 lakh from the party fund, respectively. However, both lost in the elections.
The Congress party won 99 seats in the Lok Sabha elections 2024, and Rahul Gandhi was appointed as the Leader of Opposition in the lower house.
In January 2022, based on the recommendation of the EC, the government had hiked the election expenditure limit for candidates to ₹95 lakh from ₹70 lakh for Lok Sabha elections and to ₹40 lakh from ₹28 lakh for assembly elections.
For Lok Sabha polls, the revised expenditure limit now stands at ₹90 lakh for bigger states and ₹75 for smaller states.
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