E-Paper
SBI sends all poll bonds data to Election Commission on Supreme Court’s order
State Bank of India provided electoral bond data to the Election Commission after Supreme Court's order. EC must publish details by March 15.
A day after the Supreme Court dismissed State Bank of India’s application for more time to give details about donors and recipients of electoral bonds, the bank handed over the data in a pen drive to the Election Commission of India on Tuesday evening. The poll body now has to compile and publish this data on its website by 5pm on March 15 to comply with the Supreme Court order.
Read here: SBI ‘ready’ with electoral bond details as Supreme Court deadline ends today: Report
“In compliance of Hon’ble Supreme Court’s directions to SBI, contained in its order dated Feb 15 & March 11, 2024 (in the matter of WPC NO.880 of 2017), data on electoral bonds has been supplied by State Bank of India to Election Commission of India, today, March 12, 2024,” the EC spokesperson tweeted.
According to the apex court’s order on March 11, which reiterates the February 15 judgment that struck down the electoral bond scheme as unconstitutional, the data provided by SBI must contain details of each electoral bond purchased (date of purchase, name of buyer and denomination of the bond), and details of each electoral bond redeemed by political parties (date of encashment and denomination of the bond).
HT could not ascertain if SBI also submitted any physical files to the poll body.
It is not clear if the data submitted by SBI mentions the unique hidden alphanumeric number that each bond bears, which Quint first reported in April 2018. To read this unique number, the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) paid ₹6,720 for a “Device to verify Mask-A-Print Security”, according to an RTI response received by Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd) in December 2023. This number, according to Association for Democratic Reforms’ (ADR) submissions in court, can be used to map the bonds purchased to the political parties that redeemed them.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, on behalf of SBI, told the court on Monday that the bank had interpreted the court’s February 15 judgment to mean that the bank would have to match donor and bond details with details of encashment by political parties. SBI submitted that the donor data and the redemption data are maintained in two separate silos and matching that information is a “time-consuming exercise”. He said that the unique number associated with the bond was “scrambled and put elsewhere, and that number has been kept secret”.
“We have not told you to do the matching exercise. We have asked you for a plain disclosure. Therefore, the ground on which you seek an extension of time to make the disclosure does not accord with the direction in the judgment at all,” chief justice DY Chandrachud remarked in court on Monday.
SBI submitted that some details — such as bond numbers — are stored digitally while others, such as name of purchaser and KYC details, are stored physically. This, according to SBI, was so that all details cannot be gathered easily, thereby achieving the objective of the scheme.
Read here: SBI submits details of electoral bonds to EC, poll panel acknowledges
On Monday, the apex court had also directed ECI to “publish the details of the information which was supplied to this court in pursuance of the interim orders”. This refers to the bond redemption data that political parties submitted in sealed covers to EC in compliance with the top court’s April 12, 2019, and November 2, 2023, orders. EC had then submitted all these sealed packets in one common sealed cover to the apex court and had not maintained “copies” in the “Office of the ECI” as the top court had assumed in Monday’s order.
HT has learnt that the poll body may ask the Supreme Court to get those sealed covers back so that it can publish this information. To be sure, some of this information about redeemed bonds may also be in the data that SBI has given to EC.
