Electoral Bond Scheme Concerns Beyond Its Patent Unconstitutionality – It Affects Democracy and Elections
Late last year, the central government authorized the State Bank of India to issue and redeem A new tranche of electoral bonds, 19th such parcel since Notification of Scheme in 2018, With elections to the assemblies of five different states starting next month, the timing of the announcement was predictable. Now, as a result, voters from those states will go to the ballot box having no idea about the donors supporting the various contestants.
anything but transparent
Ensuring that citizens have access to information, especially material on political funding, which one feels is an essential feature of democracy. But since its inception, the electoral bond scheme has affected the democratic process by completely destroying any notion of transparency in political funding. In this time, the Supreme Court of India has paid very little attention to this issue. It has allowed the scheme to continue unabated and refused to impose an interim stay on its operation without a full hearing.
In one such provisional order, the Court held that the bonds were, in fact, not anonymous. Voters interested in ascertaining the identity of political donors, the bench said, can simply execute the order described as “matching the following”. According to the Court, since both the purchase and encashment of bonds are done through banking channels, a person would have to look at the financial statements of every corporation to ascertain the identity of the payer – these records, the Court said, with the Registrar of Companies. should be available.
the parties have no liability
Even assuming for a moment that voters have the resources to go through the annual returns filed by every corporation in India, the order was overlooked that the political parties would be charged on every donation received through the electoral medium. There is no attendant obligation to provide details to the public. Bond. The companies are also under no obligation to disclose the name of the party to whom they made donations. Therefore, this “match the following” exercise will do nothing to pierce the veil that hides the shackles, apart from being impossible to perform. This is because anonymity is written into the program’s ideals; It represents the basic leitmotif of the system.
When he told the Lok Sabha about the outline of the electoral bond scheme, the then Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley emphasized this feature. “The donor will know to which party he is depositing the money,” he said. “Political party to file return with Election Commission” [of India], Now which donor has given to which political party, it will not be known. This accepted objective is one of the most basic features of democracy, that the right to freedom of expression, which the Constitution guarantees, includes the right to know.
The Electoral Bonds Scheme is designed to allow an individual, or any “artificial juridical person”, including body corporates, to purchase bonds issued by the State Bank of India during the notified period. These instruments are issued in the form of promissory notes and in denominations ranging from ₹1,000 to ₹1 crore. Once purchased, the buyer can donate the bond to any political party of his choice and the party can encash it on demand. Buyers are not obliged to disclose to whom they presented the bond, and a political party is forced to keep the identity of the donor secret in order to redeem a bond.
unforgivable argument
Not only this, many restrictions imposed before the launch of this scheme have now been removed. For example, amendments have been made removing the previous prohibition, which allowed a company to donate no more than 7.5% of its net profit during the previous three years. Similarly, a mandate that a company should have been in existence for at least three years before this It could donate (a requirement intended to discourage people from using mask corporations to invest money in politics) was also removed.
Thus, through its architecture, the electoral bond scheme allows for unlimited and anonymous corporate funding of political parties. In its defence, the government says two things: one, that voters have no fundamental right to know how political parties are funded and second, that the scheme aims to eliminate the role of black money in funding elections. helps to do. Upon any proper investigation, it should be clear that none of these arguments are valid.
First, the Supreme Court has consistently held that voters have the right to freely express themselves during elections and are entitled to all the information that gives purpose and power to this right. Certainly, in order to participate in the electoral process in a meaningful way and to choose their votes carefully, a citizen must know the identity of those who support the candidates.
2 by removing and doing so. Donating to political parties is ending the worry.
Furthermore, even if the bonds were to eliminate the presence of unaccounted currency, it is difficult to see what prompted the decision to grant the donor bearer complete anonymity for this purpose. Indeed, this is the reason why the Reserve Bank of India reportedly advised the government against the introduction of the scheme.
to the higher judiciary
However, concerns about the electoral bond scheme extend beyond its patent unconstitutionality. This is because by allowing anonymity it undermines the very basis of our democracy and prevents our elections from being truly free and fair. Therefore, there are few issues of greater moral urgency that await the consideration of the Supreme Court. Yet, despite challenging the scheme soon after its notification in 2018, the Court has failed to hear and decide the validity of the programme.
Delay in adjudication, as we have seen in many such cases which are pending, invariably presents a fait accompli, In this case, there has been an outright loss of pendency, as the integrity of the electoral process is at stake. Earlier judges had warned of the dangers posed by unlimited corporate funding of elections in 1957. Bombay High Court Chief Justice MC Chagla predicted that any decision to allow companies to fund political parties “could affect and even affect democracy in this country”. Is”.
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Justice PB Mukherjee of the Calcutta High Court used language that was still strong. He wrote, “To motivate the government of today by contributing money to the political fund of political parties, is to adopt the most sinister principle fraught with grave dangers to the commercial as well as public standards of administration.” “…individual citizens though similar in name to their voice will be severely handicapped because the length of their contribution can never be expected to be equal in length to the contribution of large companies.”
Today, individual voters are not only in a position where they are unable to match contributions made by corporations but also find themselves in a situation where they have no idea about the identities of donors who control the political establishment. . Could there be a bigger threat to our democracy than this?
Suhrith Parthasarathy is an Advocate practicing in Madras High Court.
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