The Supreme Court orders SBI to provide bond numbers that connect contributors and parties

NEW DELHI: Despite explicit court orders to provide all information regarding the bonds, donors, and recipients, the Supreme Court of India strongly objected on Friday to the State Bank of India withholding from the Election Commission the invisible alpha numeric number embossed on the now-banned electoral bonds. These bonds were used for nearly five years by corporate houses to make large donations to political parties.

A bench made up of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai, J B Pardiwala, and Manoj Misra said, “We take exception to SBI’s action in not furnishing the alphanumeric numbers (embossed invisibly) on bonds.” The biggest bank’s warning to the bench, which also included three justices from the UK Supreme Court as guest members, successfully communicated to the guests the forceful and resolute nature of India’s highest court.
On Monday, the bench scheduled a follow-up hearing on the subject. It ordered SBI to reply by Monday to the Association for Democratic Reforms’ (ADR) application, highlighting the bank’s oversight. Dinesh Kumar Khara, the chairman of the bank, was served with a notice of probable contempt on March 11 after the court rejected the bank’s request for an extension until June 30 to provide the EC with all electoral bond details.
On March 11, the Supreme Court granted SBI only thirty hours to provide the European Commission with all relevant information, which included the names and amounts of bond buyers, contributors and the amount they provided, and beneficiary political parties and the amount deposited into their accounts. On Thursday night, EC published the information provided by SBI.

The alphanumeric code, which is necessary to connect the donor’s and the recipient’s political parties, was withheld by SBI. Additionally, the information was provided in two distinct silos: one on the quantity and purchasers of electoral bonds, and the other about the recipient political parties and their amounts. This made it difficult to link contributors with beneficiaries and overturned the five-judge constitution bench’s February 15 ruling that voters needed to know who gave what amount to which political party.
In a related matter, the SC instructed its registry to promptly scan and digitise the information provided in sealed cover by the poll panel and return the original, along with a copy of the digitised documents, to the commission by Saturday evening in order to facilitate their uploading on the commission’s website. This was in response to the EC’s request for the return of the original documents relating to electoral bond donations to political parties. It requested that by Sunday night, the EC take action to submit this data separately.
In order to comply with the two interim orders from April 2019 and October 2023, EC has provided the court with the necessary data. Amit Sharma, the EC’s attorney, said that the poll authority had not retained a copy of those materials on file.