Electoral bonds: What's the verdict on anonymous donations?

A five-judge Supreme Court bench, headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud and comprising justices Sanjiv Khanna, B.R. Gavai, J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, will today pronounce the eagerly awaited verdict on the funding of political parties through anonymous donations by business houses, corporate bodies and even shell companies registered abroad.

The verdict should have an important bearing on the Bharatiya Janata Party especially, since it has been the largest single beneficiary of the scheme introduced in the union budget of 2017, weeks after the historic demonetisation of November 2016.

It is known that most of the donations through EB are made by big business and corporate entities, because 94 per cent of the bonds sold since 2018 were bought in denominations of Rs 1 crore.

The scheme was introduced despite opposition by the Reserve Bank of India, which wanted to issue the bonds itself and not through the State Bank of India, and wanted to issue them digitally.

In the current scheme of things—as Commodore (Rtd) Lokesh Batra, a transparency activist, has shown using RTI replies—it is the Indian taxpayers, perversely enough, who are paying the commission payable to the SBI for printing the bonds and servicing the donors and recipients!

Yet the scheme not only denies information to the citizens and voters about these donors they are facilitating, but also withholds this information from the shareholders of the companies donating. Shareholders are merely informed of the total donations outgoing, and not which political parties received the funding.

The petitioners in the case—who 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 the citizens’ right to information about the funding of political parties and promotes corruption.

Not surprisingly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received nearly 90 per cent of all corporate donations (worth Rs 680.49 crore) that five national parties together gathered in 2022–23, according to a report by election watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR).

Donations to the national parties made by the corporates/business sector in the year 2022–23 amounted to Rs 680.495 crore, which was 80.017 per cent of total donations. The BJP received Rs 610.491 crore, while the Congress got a total of Rs 55.625 crore.

The 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 came to a mere Rs 70.004 crore.

Even in earlier years, the BJP has been the single largest recipient, because big business and corporate bodies are allowed by the scheme to directly negotiate ‘favourable concessions’ with the ruling party.