The Supreme Court (SC) has done well by rejecting the plea of the State Bank of India (SBI) for an extension on the disclosure of details about electoral bonds and directed the state-owned bank to furnish these before the Election Commission of India (ECI) by the end of business hours on Tuesday, 12 March. It had desired effect and commission has received details from the SBI related to the electoral bonds. It expected to be shared soon.
The assertion comes in the wake of the Supreme Court directing the SBI to submit the details of the electoral bonds purchased since 12 April, 2019, to the ECI. The SBI is the authorised financial institution to issue electoral bonds. On 15 February, the SC scrapped the electoral bonds scheme and directed the SBI – the sole issuer of the bonds – to give the details of bonds sold and redeemed by 6 March. Two days before this deadline, the SBI had sought an extension till 30 June, citing the difficulty of correlating donor details with those of the redeemers, given some of the details were held by the bank in physical form rather than digital. Allowing the extension would have rendered the court’s push for transparency in election funding infructuous since the upcoming Lok Sabha elections would have been long over.
Now that details of electoral bond have been submitted, the ball is now in ECI’s court. As a constitutional body, it is beholden only to constitutional values and must comply with the court’s directive. As the custodian of the electoral process, it should further the court’s push to privilege the rights of citizens over privacy sought by donors and do its bit to reform election funding. And, at some stage, the donors must be matched to recipients.