New Delhi: Infighting within Aam Aadmi Party has adversely affected the online donations with the amount going down to thousands from lakhs in a day in the last few days. The party which had received as much as Rs 36 lakhs in one day has only got Rs 74,000 in the last five days.
After achieving a historic win in the Delhi assembly elections last month, the donations for the party hit a new landmark with it touching the Rs 1 lakh mark ten times between February 10 and February 26.
After the party's national executive meeting of February 26, the donations in a day reached Rs 1 lakh thrice only. It was after the February 26 meeting of NE, the reports of differences between AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal and members Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav emerged.
Between February 26 and March 4, the day Bhushan and Yadav were ousted from the political affairs committee, collections dipped to as low as Rs 6,031 a day. Since then, the contributions have been quite low except of three days, March 4, March 5 and March 12, when the party collected Rs 2.76 lakh, Rs 5.77 lakh and Rs 12 lakh respectively.
Party receives most of the donations from Delhi, with the capital contributing 44.5% of it.
Maharashtra contributes 17% of the donations followed by 7.5% from Karnataka and 6.3% from UP.
Trends show that collections tend to rise around polls, peaking just before elections and then witnessing a slump. AAP collected Rs 1.22 crore and Rs 1.04 crore on January 31 and February 4 in the countdown to the polls. It has not hit the Rs 1 crore mark since then.
The slip in the donations is worrying for AAP as the supporters and volunteers across the country are disenchanted by the rift within the party.
