Are political parties bigger than gods?

This week, a Supreme Court Constitution Bench reserved its judgement over a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the 2018 Electoral Bond (EB) scheme. During the hearing, we learnt some novel lessons about our democracy from the country’s two top law officers – lessons not taught in any classroom. The Attorney General of India said voters do not have a fundamental right to know who donates how much to political parties even though they are periodically called upon to choose between these parties to run the government. The Solicitor General of India batted for the ‘right to privacy’ of donors pumping in crores of rupees into political parties over the right of voters to know who was funding them and in return for what, and even though the Modi government has in the past (in the privacy and Aadhaar cases) vehemently denied that the citizen’s fundamental right to privacy even existed. As private corporations can also donate unlimited sums of money through Electoral Bonds, the government looks to extend the protection of this right to them -- turning seven and a half decades of fundamental rights jurisprudence on its head. The fundamental rights under the Constitution were originally guaranteed only for natural persons.

What did not get highlighted much in court are the reasons for the government’s flip-flop stance on the issue of political funding. In 2003, during the Vajpayee government, it amended the electoral law, in the name of promoting transparency, and compelled political parties to disclose the identity of donors giving Rs 20,000 or more. Fifteen years later, the Modi government launched the Electoral Bond scheme expressly to ensure complete donor anonymity at all stages -- from purchase to redemption -- giving the same justification of transparency!

What we also don’t know is, who influenced this government to place donor identities in the almirah of sarkari secrets, in the age of RTI.

In many developed countries, whose league we aspire to join soon, at least economy-wise, the laws governing political parties mandate public disclosure of donor identity. Germany publishes details of political party donors in its parliamentary papers every year. France’s electoral law requires every political party to publish the nationality, postal address and amounts donated by every person. Finland requires similar details to be published on the website of its National Audit Office. Sceptics might say this is because of State-funding, which is essentially the taxpayer’s money going into the parties’ kitty. But these laws also permit donations from individuals and corporates and they want all this information to be open for the sake of clean politics.

Countries like Estonia, Croatia, Latvia and many others prohibit ‘anonymous donations’ by expressly defining them in the law as sources where names, identification numbers and contact details cannot be recorded by a political party. Data released under RTI by SBI, which is the sole seller of EBs, shows close to Rs 15,000 crore have been donated to major political parties through this route, with the ruling BJP being the biggest beneficiary. Data analysis carried out by the Association for Democratic Reforms -- one of the petitioners in the court -- demonstrates overwhelming preference for the anonymous route of funding political parties. Yet there are hardly any takers for EBs of Rs 1,000 and Rs 10,000 denominations. Who is donating EBs of Rs 1 crore denomination and above, which forms more than 95% of the donations?

How the court rules on the legality of EBs remains to be seen. But one thing is clear – the Modi government has placed political parties on a pedestal higher than that of the gods. The Income Tax Act does not permit any exemption claim for religious donations made with or without a proper receipt. Similarly, tax exemption cannot be claimed for anonymous donations made to any institution. But 100% tax exemption is allowed for anonymous Electoral Bond donations, no questions asked!

Clearly, as the “mother of all democracies”, we urgently need to get our ‘fundas’ sorted out.