Electoral bonds: Why SC order to SBI to disclose details could have been probing

The 15 February order of the Supreme Court on electoral bonds had several facets. While the substantial one was declaring them unconstitutional because of their opacity stemming out of their anonymity and thus frustrating the right to information guaranteed by Article 19(1) of the Indian Constitution, the other no less important facet was the orders on the State Bank of India and the Election Commission of India (ECI).

While the SBI, the issuer of the electoral bonds, was asked to furnish by 6 March the details of the donors and the donee-political parties along with the donations received by them respectively from April 2019 when the bonds were first sold to 30 June 2023, the ECI was to publish the information thus made available by the SBI on its website by 13 March.

Disposing of the SBI application dated 4 March for extension till 30 June for compliance, the Supreme Court on 11 March castigated the SBI for dilly-dallying and obfuscating. The SBI pleaded inability to dovetail as many as 22,217 bonds with the beneficiary political parties given the fact that the bond details on its computer system consciously didn’t store the name of the buyer in the larger interest of anonymity (the main gravitas of the scheme) and it would be a long-drawn and painstaking affair to fetch that data from the hardcopies and dovetail them with the computer data.

The Supreme Court pulled up the SBI for obfuscation and deliberately misconstruing its 15 February order – its order didn’t at all require such matching.  All that it had ordered was disclosure of the list of donors and the list of donees separately with only the overall amounts in the two lists matching, period. One-to-one matching of bonds with the political parties thus was a figment of SBI’s own imagination as per the apex court.

The upshot of the 11 March order of the Supreme Court is it dilutes its earlier order of 15 February wherein much was rightly made out of transparency and the need for the disclosure of political parties not only with the overall amount of donations received but also of who contributed how much to each one of them.  That was necessary to ensure that the voters got inputs to find out if there was a quid pro quo between the donor and the donee.

From the information to be uploaded by the ECI before 5 pm on 15 March, however, the voters would be no wiser as the fact that the BJP had received Rs6,565 crore via bonds between 2019 and 2023 and the Congress was a distant second at Rs 1,123 crore has already been in the public domain thanks to the disclosures made to the ECI by the political parties. In the event, all that the ECI website is going to do is to reiterate what is already known. At the end of the day therefore the public would be left guessing as to who all donated the Rs 6,565 to the BJP for example.

The bottom line would be the BJP, which has been bearing the brunt of the criticism over the opacity of the electoral bonds, would laugh up its sleeves and the donors would heave a sigh of relief that while their identities as donors to be sure have been revealed, their connection with the industrial house to which they had donated remains concealed. Both would thank their stars that the Supreme Court has spared them the blushes. While the beneficiary political parties are happy, the original purchaser would be happy that the anonymity promised by the scheme at the end of the day has been honoured!

That the electoral bonds were bearer bonds should not be forgotten. It means the SBI would know only the KYC of the original purchaser but in the next 15 days – by which time the bonds need to be encashed mandatorily at the pain of their proceeds being handed over to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund – the bonds may change hands several times before being handed over to a registered political party by the last bearer.

The donee-political party would thus be clueless about the KYC details of the original buyer. Only the SBI is armed with the two details – the original buyer of the bond and the donee-political party whose identity will be known when the bonds are encashed.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.