Electoral Bonds: What is the verdict on anonymous donations?
A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud and Justices Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai, JB Pardiwala and Manoj Mishra will today deliver its eagerly awaited verdict on funding of political parties through anonymous donations by business houses. , corporate bodies and even shell companies registered abroad.
The decision should have a particularly significant impact on the Bharatiya Janata Party, as it has been the biggest beneficiary of the scheme introduced in the Union Budget 2017, just weeks after the historic demonetisation of November 2016.
It is known that most of the donations through EB are made by large business and corporate entities, as 94 per cent of the bonds sold since 2018 were purchased in denominations of Rs 1 crore.
The scheme was introduced despite opposition from the Reserve Bank of India, which wanted to issue the bonds itself and not through the State Bank of India and issue them digitally.
In the current scheme of things – as Commodore (Retd) Lokesh Batra, a transparency activist, has shown using RTI replies – it is the Indian taxpayer who is paying the commission payable to SBI for printing and servicing the bonds. Are. Donors and recipients!
Yet the scheme not only denies citizens and voters information about the donors they facilitate, but also hides this information from shareholders of the companies making the donations. Shareholders are only informed about the total donation, not which political party received the money.
The petitioners in the case – which include, among others, the NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Congress leader Jaya Thakur – have argued that the scheme violates citizens’ right to information about political funding. Is. Parties do and promote corruption.
It is not surprising that according to a report by election watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received almost 90 per cent of all corporate donations (Rs 680.49 crore) made by the five national parties. Together it was collected in 2022-23. ,
Donations made by the corporate/business sector to national parties in the year 2022-23 were Rs 680.495 crore, which was 80.017 percent of the total donations. BJP got Rs 610.491 crore, while Congress got a total of Rs 55.625 crore.
BJP’s Rs 610.491 crore was more than eight times the total amount of corporate donations declared by all other national parties for 2022-23, which was only Rs 70.004 crore.
Even in earlier years, the BJP has been the single biggest recipient, as big businesses and corporate bodies have been allowed to negotiate ‘favorable concessions’ directly with the ruling party under the scheme.