Let me begin with a provocative number — Rs 50,000 crore. That is how much Rahul Gandhi needs to be in the running to be Prime Minister in 2029.
To understand why, we need to take a temporal detour back to October 2024, the day before the counting in Haryana. I had accompanied a friend to a property broker’s office in Gurugram. The man had been playing hooky for a couple of weeks, fixing and then cancelling appointments with my friend. He said he had been busy helping a relative of his who was a contestant for the seat of an MLA.
The broker claimed that his politician-relative had spent more than Rs 250 crore on the elections, and he hinted that a part of the budget was the money he had to pay to get the party ticket since he was an outsider. The man didn’t show even a bit of embarrassment in telling us about this jaw-dropping figure. He assumed that we shared his view that electoral politics was all about who had more money.
Even if the broker’s claim was an exaggeration, it is an open secret that candidates from larger parties spend Rs 80-100 crore on an Assembly election. A large part of it involves greasing the palms of key officials, power brokers, panchayat and caste elders, distributing money to local dadas and even simply distributing cash to potential voters. Then there are the publicity expenses — handbills, posters and hoardings. Political rallies cost big money, not only on hiring tents, chairs, speaker systems and setting up the dais, but also on hiring buses to take people to the rally venue and providing them with food and cash. Elections also involve door-to-door outreach with voters, hiring local muscle to be able to enter areas controlled by rivals, the cost of transport and refreshments for party workers and volunteers and many other sundry expenses.
If this is how much it costs to contest an Assembly election, imagine how much more would be needed for a Lok Sabha contest. On an average, a Lok Sabha constituency has five to seven Assembly segments. If we assume that one can achieve ‘economies of scale’ here, even then a candidate will have to spend Rs 150-200 crore on a Lok Sabha seat to put up a strong fight.
Now, let us return to Rahul Gandhi and the Congress. In 2024, the Congress party contested 328 seats. I assume that in 2029, it will put up its own candidates in the 325-335 Lok Sabha constituencies. At Rs 150 crore per seat, the total expenditure will come to around Rs 50,000 crore; at Rs 200 crore per seat, it will rise to roughly Rs 65,000 crore.
Let us look at these numbers from another direction. The Centre for Media Studies (CMS) has estimated that the 2024 Lok Sabha elections had cost Rs 1.35 lakh crore. This included the expenditure by the Election Commission, the Centre and the states. It would be fair to assume that at least Rs 1 lakh crore out of this was spent by the political parties. Only a tiny fraction of this was done directly by the political parties, through their own bank accounts. Most of the expenditure would have been done by fronts for parties and their candidates and by their well-wishers and rich supporters.
Since we don’t have a party-wise break-up of this unofficial expenditure, I will use the official, audited numbers as proxies. Out of the official expenditure, the BJP spent about 45 per cent. It is likely that the party’s share of the overall, unofficial election expenditure was higher, but we will stick with this figure: 45 per cent of Rs 1 lakh crore is Rs 45,000 crore. The BJP got 23.6 crore votes in 2024, which means it had to spend an average of Rs 1,900 to win over each voter to its side. I repeat, this is not direct, official spending — it includes all the money spent through proxies and well-wishers. If everything else remains the same, inflation will increase this cost to Rs 2,400 per voter. Keep this figure in mind.
If Rahul Gandhi wants to be in a position to lead a coalition government in 2029, the Congress will need at least a 30 per cent vote share. If we assume a steady population growth, and take the same turnout as 2024, 30 per cent works out to 21 crore actual votes. At Rs 2,400 per vote, that works out to a total expenditure of more than Rs 50,000 crore.
So, whichever way you look at it — from the direction of the cost of fighting each Lok Sabha seat, or in terms of the cost per voter — the Congress will need at least Rs 50,000 crore to win 2029. But this is money needed for spending in just the last few months before voting takes place. The Congress will also need to raise a lot of funds to fight the various Assembly elections scheduled over the next three years.
The first of these is likely to be Punjab, where the AAP has indicated that elections could be brought forward to this winter. It is a rich state, with even richer politicians. At a conservative Rs 50 crore per Assembly seat, the Congress will need about Rs 5,800-6,000 crore for Punjab alone. Then there will be Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand in early 2027. Both of these will cost big bucks.
In reality, the Congress needs much more than this because of the nature of the party. Unlike the BJP, it is not an ideologically-driven political entity. This makes it difficult for it to centralise all fund-raising. So, money given to the Congress leaks into the coffers of individual leaders, much more than it does in other parties.
The funding hurdle is something that Rahul Gandhi has to address immediately. And for that, he will either have to mend bridges with India Inc, or empower party leaders who already have more business-friendly images than he does. The CM choices in the South suggest that the Gandhis are aware of this. In any case, without winning the trust of India’s richest, Rahul Gandhi has very little chance of putting up a fight in 2029.
