New Delhi, India – Thursday's verdict by India's Supreme Court scrapping an opaque election finance system has sent tremors through the country's politics, with transparency advocates arguing it could expose those involved in a controversial form of political finance sooner. of the national elections.
Opposition leaders say the ruling represents a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, whose government introduced the electoral bond scheme seven years ago and which fought long and hard in the high court to defend the mechanism. financing.
But the BJP itself has insisted that the court order will not affect its chances in the next elections, scheduled between March and May, in which Modi aims to secure a third consecutive term.
Electoral bonds, introduced by the BJP in 2017, allowed individuals and companies to donate money to political parties anonymously and without limits. A five-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, observed that “political contributions give a seat at the table to the taxpayer” and that “this access also translates into influence over policy formulation.”
The Supreme Court called the plan “unconstitutional.” It also ordered the state-run State Bank of India (SBI) to stop issuing bonds, provide identity details of those who bought them and provide information on bonds exchanged by each political party. The information will be made public on the Election Commission of India website. The SBI is the only organization authorized to issue bonds under the plan.
The release of that information, thanks to the court order, could give nearly a billion Indian voters their first look at the donors who secretly shelled out billions of dollars to political parties since 2017, and open scrutiny of the potential benefits. what they got in return. .
“This ruling essentially confirmed the need for transparency in the financing of political parties and reinforced that the people's right to know in a democracy prevails over any anonymity,” Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convener of the National Campaign for Freedom, told Al Jazeera. Right of the People to Information.
“Political financing is the source of corruption in India and [electoral bonds] channeled an unlimited flow of ‘black money’ to political parties anonymously.”
'Slap to the BJP'
In total, the SBI has sold electoral bonds worth $20.3 billion, including the last tranche in January this year. The BJP received almost 55 per cent of these total donations.
“The ruling party has received enormous amounts of money that it used in [the last national election in 2019]. “It has been a travesty of parliamentary democracy that has been corporatized in India through anonymous donations,” said Brinda Karat, a senior leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), speaking to Al Jazeera.
The Left party, currently in power in the southern Indian state of Kerala, was among the petitioners before the Supreme Court who had demanded that the electoral bonds be declared illegal. It was also the only major party to formally decide that it would not accept any donations through these bonds.
“The sentence has denounced the legalization of political corruption by this government. The BJP will now be accountable to the people for the money it has taken from the corporations and the policies it has formed for the corporations in return,” Karat said.
Pramod Tiwari, Congress Party MP and deputy leader of the opposition in the upper house of India's parliament, described the court verdict as a historic moment for the country.
“The judges have exposed violations of the Indian constitution by the BJP, which used legislative powers with wrong intentions,” Tiwari said, “to facilitate political financing of black money.
“This is a slap in the face to the BJP,” he told Al Jazeera. Tiwari said the ruling would affect the Hindu majority party's prospects in the upcoming national elections. “The government has been caught stealing and injecting money under the protection of legislative powers.”
'People decide'
But the BJP suggested on Thursday that it was not too worried about the court order.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, a BJP leader and MP, criticized opposition claims that electoral bonds were responsible for giving the party a dramatic advantage over its rivals.
“As far as a level playing field, the question is whether you are on the field or off the field. People decide if you are in the field,” he told reporters.
Opposition critics have also pointed out that except the CPI(M), other political parties also accepted donations through the electoral bond system. Congress, for example, received 9 percent of all secret funding channeled to political parties under the scheme, although that is one-sixth of what the BJP got.
And while eliminating the electoral bond scheme could eliminate a controversial form of financing, political parties still have other avenues to receive large amounts of money.
These include direct financing of companies, which political parties must declare to the Election Commission of India. And there, the BJP's dominance over other parties is even greater than with electoral bonds. In the 2022-23 financial year, the BJP received almost 90 percent of all corporate donations (not including electoral bonuses) according to research by the Association for Democratic Reforms, a nonprofit organization focused on electoral transparency.
In total, political parties spent $8.7 billion in India's last national elections in 2019, according to the New Delhi-based Center for Media Studies, and analysts expect 2024 to comfortably eclipse that figure.
'Celebrations' and 'discomforts'
For activists who have been fighting the electoral bond plan, Thursday's order was a moment to celebrate.
Commodore Lokesh Batra, a 77-year-old retired naval officer and transparency activist, who filed more than 80 requests under India's Right to Information Act to obtain some details of the plan, spent the day fielding calls from congratulation.
“Electoral bonds were creating an uneven playing field and were a non-transparent form of political financing,” he told Al Jazeera in a telephone interview. “Companies don't give money unless you have a quid pro quo. In this case, any foreign company could create a subsidiary in India and donate; our democracy [was vulnerable to] be influenced by foreign countries.”
The timing of the ruling at least prevents parties from accepting bonuses in another tranche before the national elections, Batra added. “Political parties must become more transparent about their financing and defend internal democracy.”
Venkatesh Nayak, director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, said his organization's research found that after the introduction of electoral bonds, opaque donations became increasingly frequent. Now, he said, institutions like the central bank of India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Election Commission of India (ECI) “must rise to the occasion.”
Both the RBI and the ECI had initially expressed reservations about the electoral bond scheme but later actually accepted it.
“The RBI and the ECI would be embarrassed,” SY Quraishi, former chief election commissioner of India, told Al Jazeera of the U-turns these institutions took when they “appeared before the Supreme Court with language similar to that of the government.”
“The electoral commission must feel very uncomfortable today,” Quraishi said.
