Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has reported to the Election Commission of India (ECI) an expenditure of Rs 286.99 crore on the West Bengal assembly election and Rs 82.67 crore on Kerala, two states that went to the polls in the same window.The statement covers the period from March 15, when the election was announced, to May 6, when the process was completed. It was submitted on August 25, with the signature of the office secretary Mahendra Kumar Pandey, with a covering letter regretting the delay.West Bengal accounted for more than half of what BJP spent across all five assembly elections held in 2026, a combined Rs 529.38 crore. The contrast within the figures is sharper still. Bengal has 294 assembly seats and Kerala 140, so some of the gap is attributable to size, but not most of it. Per seat, Bengal cost the BJP roughly Rs 97.6 lakh against Kerala’s Rs 59 lakh.The Bengal figure divides into Rs 217.16 crore on general party propaganda and Rs 69.83 crore on candidates and candidate-related expenditure.Every candidate got exactly the sameCandidate spending was Rs 69.83 crore, and the largest part of it is strikingly uniform. All 294 Bengal candidates received exactly Rs 20 lakh by bank transfer. That is where Rs 58.80 crore comes from.Nothing at all was declared for candidate-specific media advertising in either state.Central headquarters separately transferred Rs 225 crore to the Bengal state unit in three tranches, on March 24, April 7 and May 6. Those are movements of money inside the party.Of the Bengal total, Rs 88.48 crore or 30.8% went into media advertising. Kerala spent a larger share of a much smaller budget on media.HeadWest Bengal (Rs)Kerala (Rs)Central HQ, general propaganda110.74 cr13.80 crState unit, general propaganda106.42 cr41.13 crCandidate expenditure69.83 cr27.74 crGross total declared286.99 cr82.67 crOf which, media advertising88.48 cr33.61 crMedia as share of total30.8%40.7%Three heads take nearly all of itThe central party office accounted for Rs 55.77 crore of that media spending. Three entries swallow almost the whole thing.Google India received Rs 24.88 crore, CNX Media received Rs 18.24 crore, and Facebook India Online Services received Rs 6.51 crore. Together that is Rs 49.63 crore, or 89% of what Delhi spent on Bengal media. Google and Facebook also appear in the Kerala column, at Rs 4.34 crore and Rs 1.96 crore. Bengal got 5.7 times the Google money and 3.3 times the Facebook money.CNX Media appears only against Bengal. It is the second largest single payee in the schedule, booked under Media Advertisement, and the date range covering the full campaign. The Rs 18.24 crore payment to CNX Media stands out as a significant anomaly. Publicly recognised for conducting opinion and exit polls for national television networks, CNX was booked under the general “Electronic” media category for the entire campaign window. The ECI filing does not specify whether these funds purchased internal survey research, ad placement, or other broadcast services, raising questions about the intersection of independent election forecasting and direct political funding.The CNX tweet on April 29, 2026, noting that it will not be releasing exit polls for Bengal and other states.Notably, CNX did not release any exit polls or opinion surveys for West Bengal. The agency said so on its own X account. CNX’s opinion and exit polls have previously been carried by national news networks, including Times Now and Republic TV.In Bengal, agencies stand between the party and the outletBengal’s BJP state unit spent slightly more, Rs 32.71 crore, against Kerala’s Rs 26.01 crore. BJP records Rs 14 crore to Promodome Communications for newspaper advertisements, Rs 4.22 crore to Sanket Communications for print and television expenditure, Rs 3 crore to Nexus Alliance Advertising and Marketing for television advertisements and Rs 2.25 crore to Broad 7 Communication for radio advertising.This is notable because the Kerala section of the same BJP filing provides substantially more details and lists its media spending outlet by outlet. For print ads, BJP paid Malayala Manorama, Mathrubhumi, Kerala Kaumudi, Mangalam, Janmabhoomi, and Rashtra Deepika. And for television, Asianet News, MMTV, Janam Multimedia, News Malayalam, and Doordarshan were used for advertisements. The Bengal schedule also shows that the campaign extended well beyond newspapers and television. Inbox Media was paid about Rs 1.40 crore for SMS, outbound dialling and WhatsApp services. Other vendors were engaged for bulk SMS, automated calls, WhatsApp, podcasts, digital video, cinema advertising and other forms of communication.The top ten rows of the Bengal state unit’s Rs 32.71-crore media schedule has no newspaper, channel or station name at all.Payments to content creatorsThe same central schedule also records direct payments to a group of Bengali creators, commentators and digital media outfits, paid by the Delhi office rather than through any of the state unit’s agencies.Twenty such payees account for about Rs 2.73 crore. They include Suddhashil Ghosh at Rs 51 lakh, Noticias Infomedia at Rs 41.3 lakh, Banglahunt Digital Media at Rs 22.5 lakh, The News Bangla at Rs 22 lakh, Political Daily at Rs 20.8 lakh, Madhyom Communications at Rs 20.65 lakh, Jyotiraditya Roy at Rs 17.8 lakh, Priyanka Sarkar at Rs 15 lakh, Shamik Adhikary at Rs 13 lakh and Sayak Chakraborty, whose surname is misspelt ‘Charaborty’ in the filing, at Rs 2.5 lakh.The social-media schedule that says nilThe Commission’s form has two schedules built for exactly this question. Schedule 24A covers spending on a virtual campaign through social media platforms, apps and other means by the central office. Schedule 24B is the same for the state unit. Both carry a column headed ‘Name of Content Creator.’In the BJP’s Bengal filing, both schedules are blank. The consolidated account consequently records no expenditure under “Virtual Campaign”. At the same time, Schedule 3 records Rs 31.39 crore to Google and Facebook and lists individual creators and digital publishers under the broad category of “Electronic” media.The discrepancy does not by itself establish a violation. The payments may have been classified as media advertisements rather than virtual-campaign expenditure depending on the services purchased. Without invoices, contracts and media plans, that cannot be determined from the filing.But the classification has a consequence for transparency. The part of the Election Commission form specifically designed to tell voters who created virtual campaign material contains no names, while the names of creators appear elsewhere under a generic media-advertising head.Whether that is a filing error, a defensible reading of an ambiguous form, or something else is not something the document settles.There is a further structural problem with how the payments are recorded. Every creator and page in the schedule carries the same date range, March 15 to May 6, covering the whole campaign. No details tie the payments to a dated post, a specific upload or a named deliverable. Booked that way, as flat retainers rather than as purchases, the filing makes it impossible for a member of the public to work out which video, post or advertisement the money actually bought, even where the payee is named.The result is a document that says a great deal about how much BJP spent in West Bengal, and much less about what it bought with a significant part of it.