Are Electoral Bonds Transparent?

Rs. 6,000 crores in political party coffers, and no idea where they came from.

Transcript

00:30The irony is that they have been billing this as a huge victory for transparency, but it's

00:41actually not transparent at all to anyone but the two parties involved.

00:46The Modi government instituted a new instrument of electoral giving called electoral bonds,

00:52which sound really fancy, but the way they work is really simple.

00:56Any private individual or corporate entity can go to a bank, can buy a bond in any amount

01:01they want, and then deposit that bond in the bank account of a political party.

01:07The advantage of this for whoever is giving the donation and whoever's receiving the donation

01:11is that these bonds are completely anonymous.

01:14So the corporate entity knows who they give it to, and the recipient knows where the money

01:20is coming from, but no one on the outside knows about the transaction.

01:24In years past, there's been a limit on how much corporations can give.

01:28They could give up to seven and a half percent of their net profits.

01:33What the government has done is to eliminate that entirely.

01:36So now corporates can give an unlimited sum.

01:45Number one is it could insist that every rupee of political giving, either to a party or

01:50to a candidate, has to be processed digitally, so there's no more cash, so everything needs

01:55to be digital.

01:56Number two is that political parties right now aren't subject to any kind of independent

02:01audit of their books.

02:03So political parties have to disclose their balance sheets, but they're usually created

02:08by their own chartered accountants.

02:10There's no third-party check on whether or not these numbers have been doctored, so no

02:14one really takes it very seriously.

02:17Number three is that India has a very powerful election commission, which supervises the

02:21conduct of elections and is in charge of regulating campaign finance, but the regulations and

02:26authorities that that commission has date back to the early 1950s.

02:31And so very simple things like politicians paying off media houses to write favorable

02:38news stories isn't actually a violation of campaign finance law.

02:43So these are three simple things that India could do if it was serious about taking up the challenge.