On March 18, the Supreme Court ordered full disclosure of electoral bonds bought after April 2019. However, details on a portion of poll bonds bought and cashed during the first year of the anonymous political finance programme would stay out of the public domain.
This would imply that complete details regarding who purchased how many electoral bonds to give to which political party between March 1, 2018, and April 11, 2019 would stay confidential, even though the Supreme Court’s ruling on February 15, 2024 declared the electoral bonds programme to be clearly unconstitutional from the outset.
On March 18, the court denied a request made by the non-governmental organisation Citizens Rights Trust, which was represented by senior attorneys Vijay Hansaria and Sneha Kalita, to mandate full disclosure of election bond information starting on March 1, 2018. The NGO argued that information on approximately 10,000 bonds worth over ₹4000 crore that were purchased since March 2018 was not publicly available, but the court rejected the plea as not “maintainable.”
Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud of India told the NGO that the February 15 ruling specifically requested that the details of electoral bonds be made public beginning on April 12, 2019. If the NGO’s plea is granted at this time, the February ruling will undergo a “substantive modification.”
Though the judgment had explicitly directed disclosure on electoral bonds purchased only from April 12, 2019 till February 15, 2024, a subsequent order of the court in the same case on March 11, 2024 had specifically instructed the Election Commission of India to “publish the details of the information which was supplied to this court in pursuance of the interim orders [April 12, 2019 and November 2, 2023] on its official website”.
The apex court’s order from April 12, 2019 required political parties that had received donations through electoral bonds to provide the ECI with the “full particulars” of the bank account to which the funds were credited, along with the date of each credit, as well as the “detailed particulars” of the donors relative to each bond. The EC was ordered by the court on November 2 of last year to update this data through September 30, 2023, and then provide it over to the court.
So, the March 11 order had already extended the ambit of the judgment to the period prior to April 12, 2019. Besides, orders following a judgment should be read in consonance with it.
Therefore, it is still unclear why the Supreme Court restricted full disclosure to electoral bonds issued after April 2019 rather than to those purchased and paid starting on March 1, 2018.
