Electoral Bonds | SBI’s time-wasting tactic is laughable

The SBI wants to match the buyer of each electoral bond with its recipient political party. The Supreme Court did not ask for this information. Then why is the SBI sweating over it?

On February 15, the Supreme Court of India directed the State Bank of India (SBI) to submit the electoral bonds details for the buyers and recipient political parties, along with the date of purchase/deposit and denomination of bonds, by March 6.

On March 11, the court rejected the SBI’s plea and directed it to furnish details of purchasers of these bonds and the names of political parties that encashed it by March 12.

Instead of furnishing the information, the SBI pleaded with the court, two days before the deadline, for time until June 30, on grounds of a “complex process” for “decoding” the electoral bonds and “matching of the donor to the donations made”.

Was producing the said information a ‘complex process’? Was the information which the SBI claimed to be a ‘complex process’ really what the court asked?

Why did the SBI make this plea?

Collection of specific information

The electoral bonds scheme, from January 2, 2018, prescribed a specific set of information to be collected for each buyer, in addition to prescribing a clear procedure for making the applications.

The prescribed form, among others, required each buyer to furnish details of the mode of payment, the status of the applicant, the denomination, and the number of bonds to be purchased, in addition to the date of application.

The notification further mandated that the information furnished by the buyers be treated as confidential, and shall not be disclosed to any authority, except when demanded by a competent court or upon registration of a criminal case by a law enforcement agency.

For political parties encashing the electoral bonds, the scheme provided that the bonds be credited only to a specifically designated bank account in the SBI.

The scheme unambiguously provided for the collection and furnishing of the information directed by the Supreme Court.

SBI hiding behind something which has not been asked

The SBI’s application stated: “…Due to the stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, ‘decoding’ of the electoral bonds and the matching of the donor to the donations made would be a complex process.”

The SBI has also ostensibly informed that to protect the donors’ anonymity, the bank had internally directed: “No details of bond purchaser including KYC and other details will be entered in CBS (core banking system).”

The electoral bonds scheme mandated the SBI to collect and keep all the information in a confidential manner. Whether the SBI could confidentially keep this information by recording it in its CBS or otherwise was the SBI’s internal matter only.

The SBI plea goes beyond this alibi to muddy the waters further.

The petition says: “The data related to the issuance of the bond and the data related to the redemption of the bond was kept recorded in two different silos.”

Citing this as an unmanageable constraint, the SBI petition argues: “It can thus be noted that both sets of information were being stored independently of each other. Thus, to re-match them would be a task requiring significant amount of effort.”

The SBI wants to match the buyer of each electoral bond with its recipient political party. The Supreme Court did not ask for this information. Then why did the SBI offer to do it?

Quite obviously, the SBI invented this excuse of ‘complex process’ to push the sharing the information asked by the apex court beyond the Lok Sabha elections.

SBI can never match buyer and depositor

The electoral bonds had no serial number or any other identifier. The purchase and deposit processes did not allow the SBI to record any identifier of a specific electoral bond for its purchaser or depositor.

None of the three critical documents — the application, the electoral bond, and the deposit slip — recorded an identifier. How can the SBI ‘decode’ or ‘match’ an electoral bond with its buyer and/or depositor in such a case?

The electoral bonds, printed in the security printing press, did have a security feature, to avoid somebody faking the bond — a secret number embedded in the bond which could be seen only in ultraviolet light.

This number was not also recorded anywhere.

Given this, it is impossible for the SBI to link a single electoral bond, forget more than 22,000 bonds, with its purchaser and depositor.

SBI’s plea was deservingly outrightly rejected

Alarmingly, what the SBI was seeking to do — matching each electoral bond with its buyer and depositing political party — was neither asked for by the Supreme Court, nor can it be done, not in four months’ time or ever. On the contrary, the information directed by the court was required to be readily kept by the SBI.

The SBI can easily generate the information for each buyer relating to the amount of electoral bonds purchased, along with date of purchase, from the respective bank accounts of the buyers (from transaction records of non-SBI buyers).

The details of the amount of electoral bonds deposited, along with the date of deposit, for the political parties is readily available as all the bonds were deposited by the parties in their respective SBI bank accounts.

This, the SBI petition for extension deserved no consideration and was rightly rejected outrightly.

(Subhash Chandra Garg is former Finance & Economic Affairs Secretary, and author of ‘The Ten Trillion Dream’ and ‘We Also Make Policy’.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.