What’s the most important thing to win an election? A good candidate or effective policies? None of the two, really. It’s money. And the 2019 general elections have plenty of money behind the scenes, usually in the form of electoral bonds. In an RTI reply to Vihar Durv, the State Bank of India has revealed that electoral bonds worth Rs 2,256 crore were sold by the bank in the month of April 2019 alone, and that too in just 10 days. On today's Daily Dispatch, we discuss the money power behind elections.
Rs 1,716 Cr of Controversial Electoral Bonds Sold in Just 2 Months
A whopping Rs 1,716 crores’ worth of electoral bonds were sold in just two months, January and March 2019, by the State Bank of India. It seems that now the maximum amount of political donation is being made through electoral bonds, which the Election Commission of India (EC) itself termed a ‘retrograde step.’ In an RTI reply to Vihar Durv, accessed by The Quint, the SBI has said that in just two months in 2019, electoral bonds worth Rs 1716,05,14,000 were sold in 14 cities. Read the full story here.
2. The Problem With the Supreme Court Order on Electoral Bonds
On 12 April, the Supreme Court refused to grant a stay on the controversial Electoral Bonds scheme, which allows individuals and companies to anonymously donate money to political parties.
We were joined by two people on this podcast. The first, The Quint’s Poonam Agarwal who broke the story about how electoral bonds have hidden codes on them that allow parties to find out who makes a donation, as well as our legal editor Vakasha Sachdev who’ll help explain the legalities of the story. Listen to the full podcast here.
3. Secret Policing? The Quint Finds Hidden Numbers on Electoral Bonds
In a major exposé, an investigation by The Quint revealed that electoral bonds have hidden alphanumeric numbers printed on them to track down the link between donors and political parties.
This apparent outmanoeuvring by the government poses a critical question – in the name of more ‘transparency’ in political funding, following the introduction of electoral bonds, are we being subjected to an unprecedented secret surveillance? Read the full story here.
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