Hello,
You might remember, the Supreme Court, through the Election Commission, asked all political parties receiving donations through secretive Electoral Bonds to submit details to it. In sealed envelopes. One hundred and five parties submitted the data. This was way back in April 2019.
News reports got published showing how these parties, mostly based in rural parts of the country with tiny offices and hardly any press coverage, were raking in money through the opaque bonds. This helped portray the Electoral Bonds as a fair scheme. It lent credence to the BJP’s claim that bonds are an efficient way to allow “donation to any political party of donors’ choice”. The truth would have come out had the Supreme Court heard the case and opened the sealed envelopes. It did not. For more than two years. We at The Reporters’ Collective did what the apex court should have. We found out what was submitted to the apex court in those sealed envelopes. It did not require a deep investigation.
No, the 105 political parties did not receive funds from Electoral Bonds. Only 19 political parties did. Between 2017-18 and 2019-20, they received Rs 6,201 crore. And a whopping sixty-eight percent of this unaccounted money was cornered by one party, the BJP.
The Reporters’ Collective ferreted out the information in the sealed envelope by interviewing the dozens of leaders of parties that replied to the Commission, reviewing the letters the parties sent and crunching data from the annual audit report filings of political parties.
The electoral bond funding pattern makes it apparent that it is the wealthy corporations and individuals that are splurging money on parties, in this case, the BJP. Over 91% of the electoral bonds encashed were of Rs 1 crore and 8% of the bonds were of Rs 10 lakh.
Electoral democracy requires political parties to be answerable only to citizens. Not to secretive donors. Electoral bonds, as our investigation confirms again, breaches that basic tenet of electoral politics. Without knowing who is donating, there is no way to know if there has been a quid pro quo between electoral bond donors and politicians.
Remember, even shell companies, without any real source of income can now secretly donate to political parties. And, as our investigation shows, the money is largely going to the party in power.
Click here to read the story by SHREEGIREESH JALIHAL, POONAM AGARWAL and SOMESH JHA, published by Article-14 in English.
If you prefer to watch the story, you can do so by clicking on the link below. Our reporters made a multimedia version of the investigation for The Quint:.
We at The Reporters’ Collective had first revealed the Electoral Bond Scam through a 10-part award winning investigative series.
You can read all of it here: https://www.reporters-collective.in/projects/paisa-politics-exposing-the-electoral-bonds-fraud
Do write to us. We would like to hear from you about our work – the good and the not so good. We rely on you to do better. We rely on you to continue doing our work.
Best wishes,
Nitin Sethi
Member.
The Reporters’ Collective.
(ps: Our editor, Anoop George Philip is on a break. You will get to read a more crisply written letter when he returns. Soon.)
