分类： politics

India’s sprawling electoral system includes a little-scrutinized layer of political entities that has recently drawn intense attention from tax officials and investigative journalists over alleged misuse of campaign finance rules. Known as Registered Unrecognised Political Parties (RUPPs), these groups hold legal registration with India’s election body but have never secured enough votes or seats to earn official recognition at the state or national level.

With more than 2,800 active RUPPs across the country, the system was designed to open space for small, emerging political groups to participate in democratic processes. Like larger national and state parties, RUPPs are eligible to receive untraceable small donations and offer tax exemptions to donors, who can reduce their taxable income by contributing to registered political entities. But long-standing concerns have emerged that these loose regulations are being exploited for illicit tax avoidance, with a months-long BBC investigation uncovering stark gaps between the massive sums some RUPPs report receiving and their near-non-existent electoral activity.

The investigation focused on six of the highest-donation RUPPs in the 2023-24 financial year, which together reported receiving roughly 17 billion rupees (approximately $180 million) in donations. Despite this enormous inflow of funds, the six parties collectively fielded only 15 candidates in India’s 2024 national general election – and none came close to winning a seat, with every candidate losing their election deposit. One of the most striking cases is the Gujarat-based Satyawadi Rakshak Party, which reported receiving more than 3.3 billion rupees ($35 million) in donations in the year ending March 2024. When the general election was held months later, the party fielded just one candidate, who lost. According to the party’s public financial disclosures, 84.8 million rupees was spent on election campaigning, while more than 3.16 billion rupees was marked as “public welfare” spending. When contacted, party president Swati Ben Patel told the BBC the money was spent on charity, but the party kept no formal records of expenditures. Reporters who visited the party’s registered headquarters – a locked residential flat in Anand, Gujarat – found no signage, campaign materials, or evidence of any ongoing political activity. The office was permanently closed.

Similar discrepancies appeared across all six parties investigated. Aam Janmat Party, founded in Patna, Bihar in 2020, reported no individual donations over 20,000 rupees (the threshold that requires public disclosure of donor identities to the Election Commission) in its first two years of operation. Then its finances exploded: the party reported 2.16 billion rupees in donations in 2022-23, and that figure nearly tripled to 6.2 billion rupees ($66 million) in 2023-24 – more than double the total donations reported that year by India’s main national opposition party, the Indian National Congress. Like Satyawadi Rakshak Party, Aam Janmat fielded only one candidate in the 2024 election, who lost his deposit. The party’s founding president, Anamika Paswan, told the BBC she resigned from the group in 2022 and is now a vice-president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Bihar. Reporters who visited the party’s new registered address in Ahmedabad, Gujarat found the office permanently closed, and the party’s current president did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The party’s listed treasurer confirmed the group had halted all operations and said he had no knowledge of its finances. Remarkably, the party’s registered bank account remains active: the BBC successfully transferred a small donation to the account after the party claimed to have shut down.

Another group, Garib Kalyan Party, reported 1.38 billion rupees in 2023-24 donations but fielded only three candidates, all of whom lost. Its candidate Indradevi Hiralal told the BBC she never even visited her assigned constituency to campaign in 2024, despite the party’s website posting photos of supposed door-to-door canvassing. The party’s registered office was also found closed, and the president’s mother said tax officials had previously searched the family home, though she did not know the reason for the raid.

The investigation uncovered a common pattern of exploitation of existing tax rules, according to tax officials and insiders. Middlemen, including chartered accountants, connect taxpayers looking to reduce their tax bills with RUPPs that are willing to accept donations in exchange for small cuts of the funds. Donors get the tax exemption they are seeking, while the parties and their controllers keep the remainder of the sum. Surender Tiwari, president of Swatantrata Abhivyakti Party – which reported 2.19 billion rupees in 2023-24 donations – told the BBC he had no control over the group’s finances. He said a chartered accountant handled all financial matters, gave him a small sum for his campaign, and then used evidence of the election activity to market the party to donors seeking tax breaks. The accountant in question, Mayur Singh, denied any wrongdoing, saying his role was limited to filing required audit reports, though he acknowledged working for multiple of the parties investigated.

Two donors interviewed by the BBC confirmed they had given money to a RUPP explicitly to claim tax benefits. One told the outlet he donated on a friend’s advice, saying, “I did it as a way to save tax, and have declared the same” – adding that authorities had not contacted him about the contribution.

Indian tax authorities have been aware of the suspected misuse of RUPPs for years. An internal Income Tax department document reviewed by the BBC shows investigations into the issue have been ongoing since at least 2002. The document identifies 55.91 billion rupees ($595 million) in suspected bogus political donations made by taxpayers seeking illegal tax benefits, as well as 6.65 billion rupees in suspicious foreign transactions. It also notes possible violations of tax laws, foreign funding regulations, and election rules. None of the six parties investigated by the BBC have been publicly named in the broader inquiry, and the outlet was unable to confirm that any of the parties committed illegal financial wrongdoing. Three of the six parties confirmed they or their officials had faced Income Tax department action, while a fourth confirmed a relative’s home had been searched. Tax authorities at both the state and central level did not respond to requests for comment on the specific cases.

Beyond tax fraud concerns, India’s Election Commission has been grappling with the large number of inactive RUPPs cluttering the official voter rolls. Last year, the commission delisted more than 800 RUPPs that had not fielded a candidate in six consecutive elections, but it lacks the legal authority to cancel a party’s formal registration, limiting the impact of these clean-up efforts. The commission did not respond to questions about whether tax authorities had shared information on suspected irregularities involving the six parties investigated. As scrutiny of the sector grows, authorities face a major challenge: untangling the web of donations, intermediaries, and shell entities to identify who actually controls these little-known parties, where their funds originate, and how the billions of rupees they receive are ultimately spent.

Turkish authorities have launched the broadest crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community in the country’s modern history, arresting hundreds of people ranging from grassroots activists and journalists to HIV service providers and ordinary members of the public across at least 15 provinces. The operation, branded the “My Family is Safe” initiative by the government, follows a years-long trend of escalating targeting of queer groups under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and frames the action as an effort to defend traditional Turkish family structures. Those detained face a range of sweeping charges, including accusations of obscenity, facilitating prostitution, and maintaining improper financial ties with international entities.

More than 130 prominent British legal figures—including senior barristers, retired judges, and leading international law academics—have publicly challenged Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s administration, arguing that the new Israeli settlement sanctions unveiled last week by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband do not fulfill the United Kingdom’s binding duties under international law.

In a detailed six-page open letter delivered to Downing Street on Tuesday, the legal signatories first acknowledged the government’s step to coordinate its action alongside Canada and France, a rare unified international response to Israel’s long-standing settlement expansion. But the letter makes clear that the limited targeted trade measures announced are nowhere near the comprehensive action required by the 2024 binding ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered all states to actively end their complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

Last week’s policy shift marked a historic turning point for British foreign policy: the UK officially formally recognized that Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory violates international law. In his address to parliament announcing the new rules, Miliband also went further than any prior British foreign secretary, confirming that he believes a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinian communities is currently underway in the occupied West Bank.

Off-the-record government briefings to Middle East Eye (MEE) confirmed that the new sanctions will cover Israeli settlements across all occupied Palestinian territories, including not just the West Bank, but also the illegally annexed Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. The UK is not acting alone: eleven additional nations—Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden—have already joined the UK in either implementing similar restrictions or actively considering their own sanctions on goods produced in Israeli settlements.

The list of signatories backing the criticism of the UK’s limited measures includes some of the country’s most respected legal voices: high-profile human rights barrister Michael Mansfield, former Lord Justice of Appeal Alan Moses, SOAS University of London law professor Nimer Sultany, and University College London international law professor Ralph Wilde, among many others.

The letter lays out a clear roadmap for what comprehensive compliance with international law would look like for the UK. It calls on the government to expand the scope of sanctions beyond just trade in physical goods to include critical service sectors that enable settlement growth: insurance, accountancy services, and digital infrastructure that supports Israeli settlement expansion. The legal experts also demand that the government issue a public, binding confirmation that no UK public body, public sector pension scheme, or national sovereign fund maintains any investments linked to Israeli settlements. Most notably, the letter calls for the imposition of a full, complete arms embargo on Israel, a step that would mark a dramatic break from decades of close UK-Israeli military cooperation.

Ralph Wilde, the UCL international law professor, emphasized that while the government’s recent formal recognition of the occupation’s illegality is a welcome shift after years of British diplomatic inaction, the limited response does not match the scale of the legal duty the ICJ imposed on all UN member states. “The government’s decision to finally acknowledge that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank is illegal is welcome,” Wilde said. “But the consequences of this illegality for the UK and other states—special legal duties to take comprehensive action to bring this and other illegal actions by Israel, including its genocide in Gaza, to an end—are far more wide-ranging than the important but limited actions against settlements and settlers announced.”

Nimer Sultany, the SOAS law professor, framed the core issue at the heart of the UK’s half-measures, noting that Israel’s occupation is not an unintended side effect of regional conflict, but a core, intentional policy. “The elephant in the room is that the occupation is not a bug, it’s a feature,” Sultany said. “Israel’s political consensus uniformly opposes the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. Thus, ending Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, as determined by the International Court of Justice, requires immediate, effective and comprehensive actions by the UK government, not a piecemeal approach that leaves the foundations of the occupation intact.”

The letter anchors its call for a full arms embargo in the UK’s existing obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty, specifically Article 6(3), which strictly prohibits any arms transfers when a state knows the weapons will be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, or grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. “Having made that finding [that ethnic cleansing is occurring and the occupation is illegal], the UK Government cannot treat that knowledge as absent,” the letter argues. The legal experts also draw a sharp contrast between the UK’s robust, sweeping sanctions on Russia following its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the half-measures applied to Israel’s decades-long occupation. The Russian sanctions covered all major sectors of the Russian economy: major banks, energy firms, shipping networks, all arms exports, private investment activity, and cross-border financial services—all on the explicit grounds that these sectors enable and finance illegal occupation. That same logic, the letter points out, has not been extended to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, despite matching the same legal threshold.

The letter also adds one more demand: the UK government must implement strict oversight to ensure that funds raised by UK-registered charities are not diverted to support illegal settlement activities. This call comes after a June statement from Labour MP Melanie Ward revealing that Israeli settlements have received at least £28 million in donations from 32 charities registered in England and Wales. In response to that disclosure, the UK Charity Commission launched a fact-finding inquiry into charities operating in Israeli-occupied settlement territories in August.

This report was published by Middle East Eye, a media organization that produces independent, on-the-ground coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions.

In the Galilee region of northern Israel, a wave of sustained daily demonstrations has erupted, led by Palestinian citizens of Israel, in response to a new settler outpost erected in the heart of Majd al-Krum, a town overwhelmingly populated by Palestinian Israelis. The outpost, established Friday by a group of settlers originating from Tekoa, a settlement located near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, has already become a flashpoint for long-simmering tensions over land rights and state-backed demographic policy.

The new encampment was set up shortly after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich unveiled an election campaign platform that explicitly aims to “Judaize” the Negev and Galilee regions by bringing an additional 1 million Jewish residents into these areas. Smotrich, a prominent far-right figure in the current Israeli government, has publicly stated his goal to expand the West Bank settlement “revolution” into areas within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, regions that are home to the majority of Israel’s Palestinian citizen population.

Local authorities and community organizers have framed the outpost as a deliberate step to alter the demographic and geographic status quo on the ground. Izz al-Din Badran, an activist with Majd al-Krum’s popular committee, told reporters that residents first uncovered the settler encampment last Friday. Shortly after the discovery, the committee issued a call for continuous community mobilization to force the settlers to abandon the site.

The outpost itself sits on state land that the Jewish National Fund had leased exclusively for small-scale livestock grazing. Despite the terms of the lease, hardline young settlers have occupied the area, pitching permanent tents and moving in household furniture to establish a long-term presence. Local residents say that multiple private Palestinian landowners hold claims to adjacent parcels in the area, and the new outpost raises immediate fears of eventual expansion into privately owned land, or permanent restrictions on local residents’ access to their property.

Badran emphasized that the settlers occupying Majd al-Krum are the same extremist actors responsible for routine violence against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They are the same people who are here, and they will not be allowed to take over land,” he said, confirming that hundreds of local residents have joined the ongoing mobilization. “The mobilisation will continue until they leave.” In line with this commitment, the local council and popular committee have scheduled daily protests running from 5 p.m. until nightfall, and demonstrations will continue until the outpost is fully removed.

Sami Abu Shehada, leader of the Balad political party and a candidate in Israel’s upcoming national elections, warned that the establishment of the Majd al-Krum outpost is part of a long-standing, coordinated tactic of land seizure that has been used for years in the occupied West Bank’s Area C. In that region, he explained, Israeli settlers typically start by grazing livestock on small parcels of land, before gradually expanding their presence to take over entire areas of Palestinian-owned territory. This tactic, he stressed, has now crossed the Green Line, the 1949 Armistice border that has functioned as the de facto boundary between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967.

Abu Shehada argued that the ultimate goal of this campaign is to fully erase the Green Line, eliminate any recognition of separate Palestinian land, and invalidate the Oslo Accords. Under the ideological framework driving this project, all of historic Palestine is claimed as exclusive Jewish territory, with no legal distinction between land captured in the 1967 war and territory that was part of Israel prior to that conflict.

This push can be directly traced back to Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan,” a far-reaching blueprint that aims to eliminate all Palestinian national aspirations. The plan is rooted in the claim that the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, and presents Palestinians with three non-negotiable options: abandon all claims to national sovereignty and accept a second-class status under Jewish dominance, leave their historic homeland, or face violent repression if they resist displacement and dispossession.

Abu Shehada noted that Palestinian stakeholders have previously made the mistake of underestimating the seriousness of Smotrich’s plan, but the new outpost in Majd al-Krum makes the urgent threat clear. He emphasized that Smotrich does not act as an isolated extremist; he holds a senior position in Israel’s sitting government, and the settler movement is not a fringe group of independent actors. Instead, it operates as part of a state-backed network that enjoys police protection and influence at the highest levels of Israeli government.

“The danger comes from the fact that this is a state project, and a large part of the institutions of this state have adopted it and supported it,” Abu Shehada said.