The Supreme Court of India has denied the government-run State Bank of India (SBI)'s request for more time to divulge information about individuals and companies that purchased its electoral bonds to fund political parties. It stated that the information should be supplied to the Election Commission on Tuesday (12 March) and made public on the panel's website by the evening of March 15.
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Electoral bonds are a relatively new notion in Indian political fundraising. Electoral bonds, which were introduced in 2017, allowed individuals and corporations to donate an unlimited amount of money anonymously to any political party. Until a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in mid-February to abolish the seven-year-old election funding system, just weeks before the Lok Sabha elections in April-May this year, donors purchased the bonds in fixed denominations from State Bank of India (SBI) and handed them over to any political party, which could cash them using a bank account. The bonds did not compel the recipient political parties to disclose the donor's name to anyone, even the Election Commission of India.
According to the electoral bond scheme, an electoral bond was issued in the form of a promissory note with bearer character. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a bearer instrument lacks the name of the buyer or payee, hence no ownership information is recorded, and the holder of the instrument is considered to be the owner.
Brief History of the case:
Last month, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision that declared the electoral bond process 'unconstitutional'. The Modi government's electoral bonds system allows for 'anonymous' political donations. SBI was the scheme's authorized financial institution. The Supreme Court of India ordered the lender to provide the details of the electoral bonds purchased from April 12, 2019, to the Election Commission by March 6, with the information to be published on its official website by March 13.
The Recent Plea of SBI for an extension of time
SBI filed a request for an extension of the deadline to submit the details to the ECI, the SBI claimed that information on donors (purchasers) and recipients was kept in "two separate silos," and that matching each bond purchased with the bond encashed by a political party would take time.
Who challenged the SBI's request to extend the deadline?
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) filed contempt petitions, alleging that the SBI's request for an extension constituted "willful disobedience" to the court's directives in the February 15 judgment that overturned the EBS. The petitioners emphasized that SBI chose to file its case only two days before the deadline set by the SC.
The CPM suit claimed that SBI "deliberately misconstrued" the Supreme Court's directives because the judgment did not require each bond purchased to be counted against a bond redeemed by a political party.
Rather, the court had simply requested the publication of the purchaser's information (name, date of purchase, denomination of bond) as well as the information of the political parties that received and paid the bonds. According to the petition, both sets of information are easily available with the SBI.
Even if this tallying exercise was necessary, the petition said that the SBI had not "provided any cogent reasons for why this exercise would require an extension of more than three months."
What did the court say on March 11?
When the five-judge Bench led by the CJI reconvened to hear the SBI's plea and contempt petitions, Senior Advocate Harish Salve, representing SBI, stated that to keep the data of electoral bonds acquired secure, they were kept in physical form rather than online.
He further claimed that the purchaser's name and transaction data were kept separate. He stated that these factors increased the time required for the process.
Salve conceded near the close of the hearing after the Bench repeatedly pointed out that SBI was not compelled to match the bonds purchased to those issued by political parties, and that the process might be finished in three weeks.
However, the Bench did not grant SBI's appeal and required it to send all of the material to the ECI by March 12, so that it may be published on its website by March 15.
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