As a common man gets poorer day by day, it is the political parties that get richer every day whether elections or no elections, their wealth grows by leaps and bounds one of the many blessings they enjoy is Electoral bonds.
So what are Electoral bonds (EB) and how do the political parties benefit from them?
Started in 2017 by the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with the intention to bring transparency to electoral funding in India. An EB is an instrument through which anyone can donate money to political parties. Such bonds are sold in multiples of Rs 1,000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh and Rs 1 crore and can be bought from authorised branches of the State Bank of India only. As such, a donor is required to pay the amount via cheque or a digital mechanism (cash is not allowed) to the authorised SBI branch. And the donor can give this EB to the political party or parties of his choice. Technically the process is very transparent and the name of the donor remains anonymous.
But there are questions that remain unanswered, for e.g. the bonds are sold via a government-owned bank (SBI), which leaves the door open for the government to know exactly who is funding its opponents. This, in turn, allows the government of the day to either extort money, especially from the big companies, or victimise them for not funding the ruling party. A very important aspect here is that more than 75% of all electoral bonds have gone to the present ruling party in the Centre.
Further, electoral bonds were to allow common people to easily fund political parties of their choice but more than 90% of the bonds have been of the highest denomination of Rs 1 crore. When the electoral bonds scheme was announced, there was a cap on how much a company could donate to a political party i.e. 7.5% of the average net profits of a company in the preceding three years. However, the government amended the Companies Act to remove this limit, opening the doors to unlimited funding by corporate India thereby making it easy for favours to come in the form of electoral bonds.
A recent case was unearthed where a company paid Rs 40 crore through electoral bonds to ensure that there was no Excise raid on it.
Many allege that the scheme was designed to help big corporate houses to donate funds without their identity being revealed and officially paved way for money laundering. Today Indian, foreign, and even shell companies can donate to political parties without having to inform anyone of the contribution.
As per records available electoral bonds worth Rs 9,836 crore have been issued from March 2018 to January 2021. Bonds worth Rs 648.8 crore were issued in April 2022 alone, at a time when there are no elections anywhere in the country, wonder why no one is asking these questions. An NGO, Association for Democratic Reforms has challenged the scheme and filed a PIL in 2019, stating that the issue is urgent and needs immediate hearing, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the said PIL, unfortunately, the hearing got delayed due to COVID.
There are many questions and no one to answer coz we are busy discussing the 9 pm news and the irrelevant issues raised on social media platforms.
It’s time for us to ask questions but is anyone listening.
