Supreme Court ended the electoral bonds Scheme after it found the scheme “Unconstitutional”. The electoral bonds scheme was introduced for great transparency of funds related to political parties.
However, it has not provided the intended transparency but decreased the transparency further. Now the court ordered to publish of all the information related to funds of political parties which would shock the people in the coming days. We have provided detailed information regarding the Electoral Bond Scheme.
What Is Electoral Bond?:
Today the Supreme Court five-judge bench led by DY Chandrachud has ended the Electoral Bonds Scheme which was introduced in the 2017-18 Union Budget By Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
This scheme allows anyone to buy bonds from SBI and donate them to political parties. The parties will then redeem the bonds for cash. Here the donor details are not disclosed which concerned 3 petitioners of the Supreme Court.
This scheme was introduced to increase the transparency in political funding however the anonymous funding feature allowed a high amount of black money into funding for political parties. 3 petitioners approached the Supreme Court about the amendment made by the Finance Act 2017.
This Finance Act 2017 created the Electoral Bond schemes to increase transparency. The 3 petitioners argued these schemes have reduced the transparency of political funding.
Supreme Court Judgment On Electoral Bond:
The Supreme Court said the government would allow only proper money for political funding. It raised concerns regarding the feature of “selective anonymity” in the Electoral Bonds scheme. The court asked why the limit for funding the parties had been removed. It has claimed, “Electoral Bond Scheme is violative of Article 19(1)(a) and also unconstitutional”. The court ordered SBI to stop issuing the Electoral bonds with immediate effect.
Supreme Court has also ordered to submission of detailed information about the contributions through the Electoral Bond scheme to the parties. SBI will be submitting these records to the Election Commission of India (ECI) within three weeks.
Even the Supreme Court ordered ECI to publish the records on its website once it receives the data from SBI. This will increase the transparency of political funding and may leave people in shock once published.
Election Commission of India:
The judgement from the Supreme Court comes just before months of Lok Sabha elections 2024. The 5-member bench reserved the verdict on 2nd November last year and stated the verdict today. The Supreme Court said the right to information is not justified with anonymous political funding.
The SBI is going to reveal the electoral bonds purchased from 12th April 2019 for funding political parties until now. The Electoral Bond Scheme was introduced as an alternative to cash funding of political parties, thinking to bring transparency in political funding.
However, the transparency further decreased rather than enhancing the transparency of political funding. SBI is going to fetch all the Electoral Bonds issued & collect the data of contributions. Then the data will be submitted to ECI.
The ECI will publish the data of contributions that may shock people upon seeing the contributions from particular individuals or groups. However total political funding may not be revealed as cash funding might not be recorded if happened.
Conclusion:
SBI is going to return the Uncashed Electoral Bonds which have been purchased in the last 15 days within a deadline to the purchaser. It is stated that this scheme would have facilitated contributions through shell companies by compromising the accountability and integrity of Electoral funding.
From now the political funding will be disclosed along with the names of the donors which can be said a major setback to political parties. This will reflect on the political parties’ funding that may be reduced through the Electoral bonds scheme. As per reports BJP has been funded with Rs1,294 crores while Congress received Rs171 crore. BJP received 7 times more funds than Congress in a single year of FY 2023.
FACT: 16,000 crore has been funded through electoral bonds to political parties since 2018
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