Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi was given Rs 70 lakh each for fighting the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from Wayanad and Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seats, according to the information shared by the Congress party with Election Commission. Congress has alson shared that it gave Rs 87 lakh to its candidate Vikramaditya Singh, from the party fund but he lost the election from Mandi seat in Himachal Pradesh to actor Kangana Ranaut of the BJP.
It further said that other notable leader who got notable amount to fight the Lok Sabha Elections were Kishori Lal Sharma, who defeated BJP’s sitting MP Smriti Irani, K C Venugopal (Alappuzha in Kerala) and Manickam Tagore (Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu) with each of them getting Rs 70 lakh. Senior Congress leaders Anand Sharma and Digvijay Singh, both of whom lost the elections, got Rs 46 lakh and Rs 50 lakh, respectively.
Rahul Gandhi had won from Rae Bareli as well as Wayanad, but he retained the Uttar Pradesh seat. The party had won 99 seats in the parliamentary polls with Gandhi winning from the two seats. While there is a ceiling on expenditure a candidate can incur on electioneering, there is no such limit for political parties. In January 2022, based on the recommendation of the EC, the government had hiked the election expenditure limit for candidates to Rs 95 lakh from Rs 70 lakh for Lok Sabha elections and to Rs 40 lakh from Rs 28 lakh for assembly elections.
For Lok Sabha polls, the revised expenditure limit now stands at Rs 90 lakh for bigger states and Rs 75 for smaller states. The 2024 Lok Sabha elections were held in seven phases and the results were announced on June 4. Congress had last month submitted its ’part election expenditure statement’ for Lok Sabha elections and polls to the legislative assemblies of Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh to the poll panel. The statement pertained to the ’lumpsum amount paid to candidates by the party’ to contest polls.
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