JAMMU: The Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar has said that the Election Commissioner of India (ECI) has received details of Electoral Bonds from the State Bank of India (SBI) in the wake of recent Supreme Court order.
In a press conference at Jammu on Wednesday, Rajiv Kumar said that ECI will share all the relevant information in time.
“They have given us the details in time. I will go back and look at the data, and would definitely disclose it in time,” Rajiv Kumar said.
The SBI was directed by the Supreme Court to submit the data by March 12.
The Supreme Court had directed the SBI to submit the details of the electoral bonds purchased since April 12, 2019, to the EC. The SBI is the only authorised financial institution to issue the Electoral Bonds.
NEW DELHI: The State Bank of India (SBI) informed the Supreme Court on March 13 that details of electoral bonds anonymously purchased by contributors and encashed by political parties between April 2019 and February 15, 2024 were delivered by hand to Election Commission of India (ECI) in order to facilitate public disclosure of political funding.
The SBI informed that a total of 22,217 electoral bonds were purchased and 22,030 were redeemed by political parties between April 1, 2019, and February 15, 2024.
In its affidavit, the SBI said, “From April 1, 2019 to April 11 the same month, 3,346 bonds were purchased and 1,609 were redeemed by parties. Between April 12, 2019, and February 15, 2024, donors bought 18,871 bonds and 20,421 were redeemed by parties.”
Though the Supreme Court had sought information only from April 12, 2019, the SBI said that the selling and encashing of electoral bonds had started from April 1.
The ECI has time till March 15 evening to compile and publish the information received from the bank on its official website.
The SBI, which is the largest bank of the country, said it has handed over the information to the ECI about the dates of purchase of electoral bonds, the names of purchasers and denomination of the bonds. Similarly, the dates of redemption of the bonds, names of political parties which received the contributions and denomination of the bonds encashed were also provided to the ECI.
The top bank had shown urgency in sharing the information that was readily available with it. The Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud had put the bank on notice on March 11, threatening to initiate contempt proceedings if it did not supply the required information to the ECI in the next 24 hours.
The Supreme Court in its judgment on February 15, 2024 had struck down the anonymous system of political funding through the ‘Electoral Bonds scheme’ and directed the SBI to disclose information about who bought the bonds for which political party.
The SC had given the SBI time till March 6, 2024. Two days before the deadline, the bank had applied to the Supreme Court for an extension till June 30, by that time the Lok Sabha elections would have been over.
SC rejects SBI plea seeking more time
On March 11, the 5-judge bench headed by the Chief Justice of India had convened in a special sitting to dismiss the bank’s application seeking more time to comply with the court directives.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for the SBI, had explained that matching the bonds purchased and names of donors with the parties which encashed the bonds was a “time-consuming and complex” exercise. Details were kept in two separate silos and not stored in a digital format. The judgment had capsized the “core purpose” of the electoral bonds scheme, which was “utmost secrecy”.
“But we did not tell you to match the details. We had only asked you to do a plain disclosure. We just wanted you to comply with the judgment,” the Chief Justice had clarified to Salve.
What did the contempt plea stipulate?
The contempt petitions filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, Common Cause and Communist Party of India (Marxist) had contended the bank was deliberately trying to ensure that details of donors and the amounts contributed to political parties anonymously were not disclosed to the public before the Lok Sabha elections due in April-May.
The contempt plea also pointed out that the bank’s stand was contradictory to an affidavit filed by the central government on March 15, 2019, which said that information about the bonds was completely traceable and quickly available.
The petitioners claimed that the SBI maintains a secret number-based record of donors, who buy bonds and the political parties to which they donate. Additionally, each electoral bond also possessed a unique number making it easier to trace it, they contended. “A simple query on the database can generate a report in a particular format which does not require any manual verification,” the plea said.
Highlighting that the SBI had enough manpower to retrieve the information within the stipulated deadline, the petitioners pointed out, “The SBI has 2,60,000 employees, 22,500 worldwide branches administered by a headquarters, 17 local head offices, 101 zonal offices and 208 foreign offices in 36 countries. It is hard to believe that the SBI is not able to gather information which the SBI has itself recorded.”
Referring to Section (4) of Clause 7 of the scheme that makes it mandatory to disclose information furnished by a buyer when demanded by a competent court, the petitioners claimed that “it is inconceivable that the SBI does not have the recorded information readily available within its database.”
The petitioners also relied on a Right to Information response given by the bank to retired Commodore Lokesh Batra in 2018, saying that it had spent Rs 60.43 lakh on Information Technology system development, Rs 89.72 lakh on operational costs and that the net cost for floating of electoral bonds was Rs 1.5 crore.
“This implies that a well-functioning IT system is already in place with respect to management of sale and redemption of electoral bonds,” the plea asserted.
Pointing out that only 19 out of the 29 the SBI authorised branches sold electoral bonds and only 14 branches encashed them, the contempt plea said that “data available as of January 2024 further shows that only 25 political parties had opened their accounts and are eligible for encashing electoral bonds” and “therefore, compiling of this information should not be difficult as the system is already in place.”
Such a “defiant approach” of the SBI attempts to stifle a citizen’s right to audit actions of the political class and is therefore contemptous, the petitioners concluded.
Experts contest SBI’s claims
Professor Jagdeep Chhokar, founder-member and trustee of the ADR, termed the SBI move “not surprising but unfortunate.” He earlier told The Hindu that the “data is obviously in digital format and collecting data from different States and locations and taking four months for that is impossible in this day and age.”
Concurring with this, former Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg told The Wire that such information was “available at the click of a button” and that the bank had either deliberately misconstrued or failed to understand the “simple nature of the six bits of information” that they are required to give to the ECI.
According to a report published in The Reporter’s Collective, the SBI has previously provided similar data to the Union government as well as the Finance Ministry within 48 hours. It pointed out that all electoral bond-related work was overseen by a specific team of the SBI called the Transaction Banking Unit (TBU) to ensure that the government can access crucial information on a short notice.
In 2019, a Huffington Post investigation divulged that in a January 2018 meeting, the SBI had asked the Union Ministry of Finance to include a serial number on the bonds to have an audit trail. The bank believed that without such a number, it would fail to submit information on donors and redeemers of bonds if a competent court or law enforcement agency asked for it.
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