A five-judge Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court bench on February 15 struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme (EBS). Introduced by the Centre in 2018, EBS allowed individuals and corporations to anonymously fund political parties by purchasing electoral bonds from the State Bank of India.
Key points
- The courts said that it violate the right to information embedded in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.
- The court held that the RTI can only be restricted based on Article 19(2), which speaks of the reasonable restrictions to freedom of speech and expression. It does not include curbing black money as a restriction. Even assuming curbing black money is a legitimate purpose, it is not proportional to the restrictions posed by this scheme.
- The court said this scheme is not the only means to curb black money in electoral financing.
- The court unanimously held that voters have a right to information about political parties and their sources of funding.
- For the scheme to be considered legitimate, the government scheme would have to essentially satisfy three aspects. This was based on the court’s proportionality test, laid down in its 2017 verdict in the KS Puttaswamy case over the right to privacy.
- In the Puttaswamy judgment, the court said that the right to informational privacy includes political affiliation.
- Section 29C of the Representation of the People Act, 1951requires political parties to prepare a report detailing the donations received by them in a financial year.
- Parties are required to declare all contributions higher than Rs 20,000 in this report, and specify whether they were received from individual persons or from companies.
