Electoral bonds legitimise political corruption, says Yechury

The CPM on Saturday upped its ante against electoral bonds saying it legitimises political corruption and flies into the face of right to know in the democratic functioning of the polity.

A day after the party approached the Supreme Court on scrapping electoral bonds, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury said time has come for seriously think about "very deep" electoral reforms.

He also said the recent amendment providing retrospective sanction for donations received from abroad from 1976 was to save both the Congress and BJP.

Electoral bonds were introduced by the NDA government in the 2017 budget and is consistently being opposed by the Left parties.

"The net effect of issuance of electoral bonds is that even a company owned by a foreign corporation can finance a political party to an unlimited extent without either the name of the donor or the donee party being disclosed in public domain. This is a ripe way to ensure that all kinds of quid-pro-quo arrangements are made by the ruling party with all kinds of entities without any public knowledge or scrutiny," Yechury told a press conference.

Earlier, there was a ceiling on the amount of donations, which was 7% of the average total profits of three years.

"Constitutional challenge to electoral bonds is on the ground that it flies into the face of right to know in the democratic functioning of the polity. 89% of corporate donations to parties in 2016-17 went to the BJP. Electoral bonds legalise political corruption. There should be a ban on corporate funding to parties. Instead, they should give money to a corpus which can be used for state funding of parties," said Yechury.  

On the amendment to Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), he said the Congress and the BJP have received huge amounts of money from foreign companies and had these parties not amended the FCRA retrospectively, they could have been prosecuted.

"They saved themselves," he said.  

"Political parties, being recipients of corporate fundings, use their stints in the government to make policies that suit the 'friendly' corporates. These corporates constitute the 'supply side' of corruption, which is corroding our system. Unless corporate funding is banned, this problem cannot be solved," he added.