Three months after businessline exposed use of registered unrecognised political parties (RUPPs) to disguise black money as electoral donations, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has begun proceedings for delisting 345 such political parties.

The ECI, in a statement to media on Thursday, said it has started proceedings against parties which have “failed to fulfil the essential condition of contesting even a single election for the last six years since 2019 and the offices of these parties could not be physically located anywhere.”  

RUPPs are parties that have failed to secure sufficient percentage of votes in the Assembly or Lok Sabha polls to get registered either as state or national parties.

These 345 out of 2,800 RUPPs registered with the ECI are from different States and Union Territories (UTs) across the country, as per the ECI statement.

On March 20, businesslinedid a report headlined: “Registered unrecognised political parties beat BJP & Congress to get ₹10,000 crore political donations during 2022-24.”

Notice to RUPPs

The news report stated that the Income Tax department had noticed that over 3,260 RUPPs had parked ₹10,000 crore in hundreds of bank accounts to multi-layer fund transactions that were suspected to have been used for other than electoral purposes.

In a follow-up, the newspaper reported on May 4 that the IT department had launched a crackdown on RUPPs and recovered ₹1,400 crore from 63,000 donors who evaded tax by giving electoral donations in two years from 2022.

All political parties are registered with the ECI under the provisions of Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act 1951. Under this provision, any association once registered as a political party, gets certain privileges and advantages, such as tax exemptions, amongst others.

The ECI said it conducted a nationwide exercise and identified 345 RUPPs till now. Top ECI sources, however, stated that this is just the beginning since Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has tasked the Commission to screen such parties more to isolate those violating the laws and rules.

In order to ensure that no party is unduly delisted, the CEOs of the respective States and UTs have been directed to issue show-cause notices to such RUPPs following which, these parties will be given an opportunity through a hearing by the concerned CEOs, the statement read. 

The hearing by concerned CEOs will be completed in 30 days, Commission sources stated.

The final decision regarding the delisting of any RUPP shall be taken by the ECI. After that, a list of the delisted parties will be put on the Commission’s website. 

On why no probe has been ordered into money laundering of a humongous sum of electoral funding, top ECI sources said the IT will be free to probe each of them once the de-listed RUPPs names are made public.

“This exercise has been conducted with the aim of cleaning up the political system,” the ECI observed.

Published on June 26, 2025