Electoral bonds: ‘Matching’ code may be missing, but petitioners hope for ‘quid pro quo’ trends

What is not expected to be made public is the unique alphanumeric code printed on each electoral bond that is only visible under certain light. This, according to SBI, was not recorded in the system. Former Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg, who was Economic Affairs Secretary when the Electoral Bond scheme was formulated in 2017, said the unique code on each bond was a security feature and not recorded either at the time of sale, or at the time of depositing by a political party.

Without this, it would be impossible to match the donor with the party, he said.

But petitioners and lawyers arguing the case in the Supreme Court are hopeful there would be enough evidence in the datasets to establish quid pro quo. Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, who represented the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a petitioner, told The Indian Express they were expecting the Unique Number assigned by SBI on both the silos of data (the donor details and the purchaser details) to be made public.

“The whole purpose of the exercise is that the voters should know who is funding whom. The SBI has both sets of Unique Numbers and they will have to give them along with the donor and buyer data sheets. Otherwise we will again file a contempt petition against the SBI,” Bhushan said. While the Supreme Court said there was no need for SBI to do the “matching exercise” or “correlate it with the purchaser and the political party”, his interpretation is this could easily be done by others subsequently.

Jagdeep Chhokar, Founding Member and Trustee, ADR, the organisation that has been campaigning for transparency in election funding, was more circumspect, but said this would be enough to establish “obvious quid pro quos”.

He told The Indian Express they were gearing up to conduct forensics on the SBI data, depending on what the disclosures were. “We don’t expect watertight proof but yes, broad trends in funding will emerge. I am confident some amount of matching will be possible if no major obstacles and roadblocks exist in the data or have been created in it. If that be the case, we will take whatever constitutional actions are available to us,” he said.

According to him, once the date of purchase of an electoral bond by a donor was available (since the instrument had to be redeemed within 15 days) along with the date of encashment by a political party, “ several co-relations can be established”. For instance, he said, connections can be drawn with changes in government policy and the donations or actions by investigating and enforcement agencies prior to the electoral bonds being purchased.

The details of the bonds sold and encashed before April 12, 2019, were given to the Supreme Court in a sealed cover earlier as per its interim order in 2019. On Monday, the Supreme Court asked the ECI to make that earlier set of data public as well. The disclosures from all political parties about receipt of bonds, lying in a sealed box with the EC and later in the top court’s registry, was opened in court Monday, and ordered to be put up on EC website.

Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd), an activist whose replies obtained through RTI have been used extensively by the petitioners in the case said, the court’s decision to include the disclosure of the receipts supplied by all political parties was a “tactically correct” move by the apex court.

“What political parties have submitted and what the SBI will give can easily be matched. There should be no discrepancies. The Supreme Court has hinted to the SBI that they too should reveal everything since this data is also going to be made public,” he said.