It’s time the whole truth came out

The State Bank of India (SBI) did well to finally comply with the Supreme Court’s order to furnish the information about Electoral Bonds to the Election Commission (EC) on March 12. It does not do any credit to the SBI that it dillydallied on the disclosure and had to be coerced to do it on pain of contempt of court action by the Supreme Court.

The country’s largest bank is a State-owned bank, and not a government-owned one. It should have adhered to the best norms of prudence and transparency and complied with the court’s directive without seeming to be deliberately delaying revealing the information the court had directed it to reveal. It gave the impression that it was trying to protect the interests of the government which may have had reasons to seek to stall the disclosures. The SBI was supposed to be a neutral agency for the implementation of the Electoral Bonds scheme and it should have acted like one.  

The SBI has only provided the basic details about the Electoral Bonds. It is reported that 22,217 Electoral Bonds were purchased for donations to political parties. But the matching of the data, which involves the linking of the donor of the bond with its recipient, has not been done. This is important because that was the main purpose of the court’s directive for disclosure. The court had meant this when it said that “there is a legitimate possibility that financial contribution to a political party would lead to quid pro quo arrangements because of the close nexus between money and politics.”  

So the data will have meaning only when it is known which party got how much and from whom. The SBI has the details and the resources needed to match the data. It should not come up with excuses like the “practical difficulties” it has in undertaking the decoding exercise. It had claimed that stringent measures had been undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous. But there is a greater purpose in transparency and openness. 

The bond data is now with the EC. The court has directed it to make public by Friday the information it has received from SBI. Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar has said that the Commission will make the details public “in time,” without specifically mentioning the court’s deadline. That is welcome.

The EC is a constitutional body which has the responsibility to conduct the elections. The nature of campaign finance should be an important concern for it. Rajiv Kumar has said that the Commission is committed to transparency and “the voter has every right to know what we are doing.” That should also cover the voter’s right to know where the political funds came from and where it went.