A day after the entire data on electoral bonds were made public, activists and petitioners said on Friday that an independent Special Investigation Team (SIT) should be formed to probe all aspects of the now-scrapped scheme.
Claiming that electoral bonds had emerged as the biggest scam of Independent India, lawyer Prashant Bhushan said at a press conference: “There were no money trails on 2G and coal scams. But the Supreme Court ordered a SC-monitored probe. What came out in electoral bonds has money trail, and there should be an SC-monitored probe”.
Also read: Do the electoral bonds disclosures merit a full-fledged probe? | In Focus podcast
The Supreme Court scrapped the electoral bond scheme on February 15 and asked the State Bank of India (SBI) to share all details on bonds sold and redeemed from April 2019. On Thursday, the Election Commission published the data submitted by the SBI on electoral bonds, which contained alphanumeric numbers that could match the donors with the political parties who received the bond money.
‘Donors got contracts’
Mr. Bhushan also alleged that 33 companies that donated the ₹1,751 crore got contracts worth ₹3.7 lakh crore, while 41 companies that faced action by the CBI, the ED and Income Tax Department contributed ₹2,471 core to the BJP. Of this, ₹1,698 crore was given after raids, he claimed. There were also 30 shell companies that donated around ₹143 crore.
He said that in 49 cases, contracts worth ₹62,000 crore were given after the companies donated around ₹580 crore to the ruling party. In 192 cases, he said, ₹551 crore were donated before the contracts were awarded.
According to Prof. Jagdeep Chhokar, founder member of the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), the chief petitioner in the case, this data are “proof of the corporate-political nexus that all of us know exists but did not have any proof of”.
He said the fight had been for ensuring transparency in electoral funding. “All that was spent was public money”.
RTI activist Anjali Bharadwaj, who is also on the board of Common Cause, one of the petitioners in the case, said the fact that 95% of the bonds sold were of the highest denomination of ₹1,000 crore shows that there is big-ticket corruption involved. She also questioned whether the SBI was working independently.
