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Operation Poll Money: How Pakistan's ISI is flooding India with fake currency this election season

Pakistan's ISI has stepped up the flow of fake currency into India as demands for counterfeit banknotes rise for illegitimate expenses during the ongoing campaign, an India Today investigation has found.

The 2019 elections are rated as the world's most expensive polling exercise, with an estimated cost of Rs 50,000 crore, or $7 billion, according to the New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies.

But the money pouring into the campaign may not be all clean. India Today's Special Investigation Team (SIT) found election expenses might have been tainted by the ISI's bogus currency.

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Video: PM Modi hugs, touches feet of 98-year-old BJP veteran in Bengal

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday hugged and honoured 98-year-old Makhanlal Sarkar, one of the earliest and senior most members of the BJP. The scene unfolded on the stage ahead of Suvendu Adhikari's swearing-in as West Bengal's Chief Minister in Kolkata. PM Modi also touched Sarkar's feet and presented a shawl to him as a mark of respect. In 1952, Sarkar was arrested in Kashmir while he was accompanying Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee as the latter was marching to hoist the tricolour there. BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya described the elderly party leader as "one of the earliest grassroots figures associated with the nationalist movement in post-Independence India."

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