SBI filed ‘false affidavit’, recorded electoral bond numbers ‘illegally’: Former finance secy Subhash Garg

 SBI filed ‘false affidavit’, recorded electoral bond numbers ‘illegally’: Former finance secy Subhash Garg

Electoral bonds were brought in to increase transparency in political funding, but it turned into a “sorry chapter in India’s history”, former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said.

A day after the State Bank of India (SBI) provided all details of electoral bonds purchased and redeemed, including the alphanumeric codes of each bond that enabled donors to be matched with the recipients, former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg on Friday said the bank was not supposed to record the bond numbers and in doing so it had violated the anonymity promised to donors under the Electoral Bond Scheme, 2018. He also pointed out that the earlier affidavit filed by the bank on the matter was “ostensibly false”.

The SBI had done something “completely unlawful and unexpected”, Garg told The Indian Express. By recording the alphanumeric codes of the bonds sold to donors and encashed by political parties, the bank had hit at the basic feature of the scheme that was brought in by the government in 2018 to enable anonymous political donations, he said.

“The SBI said in its first affidavit that the information of donors and parties was kept in physical form in two silos and that it would take three months to match. But subsequent events have shown that they recorded the information in a digital form. Their first affidavit appears to be motivated by the desire to push the disclosure of the data beyond the Lok Sabha elections. Why did they file the ostensibly false affidavit,” asked Garg.

He said the electoral bond scheme was brought in to increase transparency in political funding by moving from cash to white money, with a feature of anonymity for the donors. But it had become a “sorry chapter in India’s history”. The aims were “frustrated by SBI’s patently illegal act,” he said.

The bank had provided all the details to the Election Commission (EC) on Thursday on the orders of the Supreme Court, which struck down the scheme on February 15. Also on court orders, the EC published the data on its website on Thursday evening. The court had instructed SBI to provide the data to the EC by March 6, but the bank moved the court on March 4 seeking time till June 30 to do so. It argued that matching the donations to the parties was a “time-consuming exercise”.

The court, however, rejected the plea and told the bank to provide the data by March 12 and the EC to publish it by March 15. The SBI provided the names and amounts of the donors and parties, but not the alphanumeric codes. Once again, the court cracked down on the bank and on Monday directed it to provide all details, including the alphanumeric codes, by 5 pm on Thursday.