Electoral bonds: Black money for political parties remains the elephant in the room

Following the battle in the Supreme Court to get the State Bank of India to reveal data about electoral bonds in a manner that allowed donors to be matched with the political parties that received them, it is clear that the elephant in the room is black money – or to put it unambiguously, cash.

Electoral bonds, which the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional on February 15, were paper instruments that anyone could buy from the State Bank of India and donate to a political party. It allowed donors to make ostensibly anonymous contributions to political parties. However, while parties knew the identity of their donors, the public did not. This, as the court noted, made the scheme vulnerable to quid pro quos.

Even though the government of the day claimed that the scheme would eliminate unaccounted funds from the political system, this did not happen. For instance, Subash Chandra Garg, a former secretary of economic affairs, estimated in a television discussion that electoral bonds did not fund more than more than 10% of the total election-related expenditure. “So, there is an enormous amount of black and other corrupted money which is into the system,” Garg said.

It is clear that India can try any convoluted or complicated scheme, be...

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