Electoral Bonds : EC demands disclosure of donors in interest of democracy, free and fair elections..!

New Delhi, April 11: Citing the anonymity attached to donors as well as amounts of cash donated, which hamper the poll panel's transparency push, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court that electoral bonds form a cause of worry in a democracy.

  

The EC's submission came during PIL proceedings before a bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, which is considering passing interim orders on whether the sale of bonds needs to be stayed. The PIL demanded that if the bonds are to continue, transparency of individual and corporate donors and their amounts need to be observed in larger public interest.

The bench sought the EC's view on two demands. "Electoral bonds legalise anonymity. If transparency in election funding is to be maintained, this anonymity must go. If a bond is made transparent, we have no problem", claimed the Election Commission while hearing.

Citing the query of whether the list of donors to be published, ECI said, "Disclosure is in the interest of democracy, free and fair elections, and right of citizens to make an informed choice to vote. In 2003, we took one step forward by ensuring government companies and foreign subsidiaries are kept out of political funding. Now we have gone two steps back as we do not know if the donor is a government or foreign firm. Also, parties need to disclose only the total amount and not individual contributions."

Electoral bonds are bearer instruments in the nature of Promissory Notes issued by banks. They are interest-free instruments that can be purchased from specified branches of the State Bank of India by any citizen of India or body incorporated in India within fixed periods.

The government’s argument is that banks would be able to track the buyers of electoral bonds through their KYC details and thus ensure that clean money comes into the system, while protecting the donor’s anonymity. However, the other point of argument confirms that this has made political funding more opaque since there is no way of knowing who donated and how much to a political party.