Contempt Plea In Supreme Court Against SBI For Not Disclosing Electoral Bonds Data
The plea states that the data is deliberately being held back so that voters are unable to exercise an informed choice in the upcoming 2024 general elections.
The Association for Democratic Reforms has filed an application seeking to initiate contempt proceedings against the State Bank of India for wilfully and deliberately disobeying the top court's order to furnish the electoral bond data by March 6.
Last month, the apex court declared the electoral bond scheme unconstitutional and directed the State Bank of India to furnish all the data pertaining to these bonds to the Election Commission of India by March 6, which in turn was supposed to make the data public by March 13.
It must be noted that the public sector bank has requested a deadline extension till June 30, citing certain "practical difficulties" with the decoding exercise and the timeline fixed for it.
ADR's plea states that SBI's application seeking an extension of the March 6 deadline has been filed with mala fide intention, which demonstrates a wilful and deliberate disobedience of the top court's order.
The extension has been deliberately sought so that the data is not disclosed to the public before the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the plea said.
It is alleged that SBI has a record of the unique number allotted to each electoral bond and the KYC details of its purchaser. Thus, it is inconceivable that SBI does not have the recorded information readily available within its database, it says.
In its application, ADR has stated that the centre has itself said that the electoral bonds scheme envisages building a transparent system of acquiring bonds with validated KYC and audit trails.
Electoral bonds are completely traceable which is evident from the fact that SBI maintains a secret number-based record of donors who buy bonds, and the political parties they donate to.ADR's Application
Since each electoral bond has a unique number, a simple query on the database can generate a report in a particular format that does not require any manual verification, the plea states.
Lastly, the plea remarks that the voters of this country will not be able to exercise their informed opinion in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections if the data is not released on time as per the top court's order.
Alleging contempt on SBI's part, the plea says that this defiant approach towards citizens’ ‘Right to Know’ about huge sums of money received by parties through electoral bonds in a non-transparent and unaccountable manner is reprehensible.
