It’s our democracy, stupid!

The Lok Sabha elections are here and election-talk has naturally taken over the media. The political speeches, the psephologist spins, the pre-poll surveys, and the slander, the jokes, the conspiracy stories, the human-interest anecdotes, the fake news, and the jingles that circulate non-stop, which have made elections a many-sided ritual, though, should not distract attention from the biggest issue this time: the matter of Electoral Bonds.

Introduced by Arun Jaitley, the then Finance Minister, in 2018, the Electoral Bonds scheme allowed individuals and companies to buy unlimited bonds of up to Rs 1 crore denomination from the State Bank of India and donate them to the accounts of political parties. The scheme was designed so that donations to political parties remained anonymous and neither the donors nor the recipients needed to show who they were donating to or receiving from. Besides letting the ruling party coerce donations from private companies, the Electoral Bonds permitted foreign companies too to donate anonymously to political parties (if they had the fig leaf of being present in India), allowing foreign players huge influence over our country’s politics and governance.

The BJP-led NDA government had prepared the legal ground to allow for these shocking new provisions. The Finance Act, 2016, amended the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2010, to let foreign companies with a stake in Indian entities to donate to political parties in India for the first time. The following year, the Representation of People’s Act, 1951, was amended to allow political parties to keep their political donors anonymous. The Companies Act, 2013, was amended to permit companies to donate unlimited amounts of money, no matter whether the companies were making profits or losses themselves, which made possible the disturbing option of shell companies being set up to finance political parties. The Income Tax Act, 1961, which exempted political parties from paying tax on receiving funds above Rs 20,000 provided they shared the details of the donations, was also amended to make this requirement inapplicable for Electoral Bonds.

The anonymity thus guaranteed to political donations was a gross violation of the right of voters to know the funding sources of political parties. Indeed, this anonymity is also unfairly selective since the government can access from the SBI the details about the Electoral Bonds received by opposition parties and penalise their donors.

Put simply, the Electoral Bonds scheme did away with the institutional care that India had shown to safeguard its democracy.

Of course, the dangers the Electoral Bonds posed to our polity were evident long before the Supreme Court termed them unconstitutional two months ago and asked the SBI to disclose the details of the buyers and recipients of Electoral Bonds. The bank’s reluctant disclosure showed that the BJP’s share of the Electoral Bonds, which was nearly Rs 7,000 crore, was way more than what the other parties got.

It now appears that several companies bought Electoral Bonds after ED raids on them or to lobby for government contracts. In further proof of the blatant abuse of government power, the Finance Ministry forced the SBI in 2018 to let the BJP encash its Electoral Bonds worth Rs 10 crore after they had expired (the Electoral Bonds had to be encashed within 15 days of their purchase by the donor, as per the rules set by the BJP government itself).

Anyone can see that the Electoral Bonds were a way for the ruling party to ensure for itself greater financial might than the opposition parties. The central government has used other means, too, to weaken opposition parties. The ED and the CBI have selectively targeted members of opposition parties. A recent Indian Express report claimed that the investigation into the corruption cases against 23 political leaders had been either stalled or closed after they shifted to the BJP.

The violation of our democracy is so clear that the current government has lost credibility to ask for another chance at running the country. Even among its own supporters.