New Delhi: The CPM has accused BJP of playing havoc with the country's national security for the sake of winning elections. Addressing a press conference, Yechury said the government's proposals to make political funding more transparent was already being torn to bits in poll-bound Tripura. 

"The entire national highway is blocked with BJP trucks being driven in from Assam. While poll expenses of individual candidates are capped, there is no bar on spending by political parties. This is counterproductive."

Following finance minister Arun Jaitley's call for suggestions on ways to reform electoral funding, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury also wrote to the finance minister, seeking the withdrawal of proposed electoral bonds. The CPM leader said the proposal was nothing but a "bond route to legalising money laundering", and that the move would add to opacity in electoral funding rather than increasing transparency.

Taking exception to the government scheme and calling it "deeply regressive", Yechury said the donor, donee and the amount -- each of the three vital aspects -- were each to remain unknown, or known only to the government of the day.

In his letter, while Yechury has asserted that the Left is in favour of more transparency in political funding, he said, "The measures you have introduced recently, I regret to say, have reversed any move towards transparent and clean political funding that may have been possible. 

Electoral bonds are a deeply regressive move which will make the donor, donee and the amount, each of these three vital aspects, a State secret."

The Left leader also said that by lifting the maximum limit on companies for political donations, the government had raised the prospect of allowing "shell" companies being set up with black money to fund political parties and warned that such a step is "seriously injurious to the state of our democracy".

The CPM general secretary said, "The government should take new steps which will make our democracy healthier, more transparent and enable a genuine level-playing field, where a common citizen can find it as easy to contest elections as a moneyed man".