Electoral bonds case | Five-judge Bench to hold special sitting on SBI plea for more time

A contempt plea filed by Association for Democratic Reforms against SBI is also listed along with the application before Bench on March 11

A view of the Supreme Court of India in New Delhi. File | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma

A special sitting by a five-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud is scheduled on March 11 to hear an application filed by the State Bank of India (SBI) seeking time till June 30 to share details of electoral bonds purchased anonymously and encashed by political parties since April 2019.

A contempt petition filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms against the SBI is also listed along with the application before the Bench on March 11.

The Bench, also comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B.R. Gavai, J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, is the same which struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional in a unanimous verdict on February 15.

The verdict had directed the bank, which was authorised to transact under the scheme, to submit full details of bonds to the Election Commission (EC) by March 6, 2024. The EC was in turn ordered to publish the information on its website by March 13, 2024.

However, the bank had filed a nine-page application in the Supreme Court on March 4, just two days before the deadline. It said it needed time till June end to provide the EC with the details. The information and documents were scattered across its various branches and decoding them was tough and would take time.

The contempt petition, filed through advocates Prashant Bhushan, Cherul D’souza and Neha Rathi, contended the bank was deliberately trying to ensure that details of donors and the amounts contributed to political parties anonymously were not disclosed to the public before the Lok Sabha elections due in April-May.

‘Stand contradictory’

The petition said the bank’s stand was directly contradictory to an affidavit filed by the Union government on March 15, 2019, which had assured the apex court that information about the bonds was completely traceable and quickly available.

The Centre’s affidavit had claimed the electoral bonds scheme envisaged a transparent system of acquiring bonds with validated KYC and audit trail. The SBI would record KYC, PAN, details of identity and address in full of all the donors, the contempt petition argued.

“The SBI maintains a secret number-based record of donors who buy bonds and the political parties they donate to,” it submitted.

Besides, each electoral bond had a unique number. “A simple query on the database can generate a report in a particular format which does not require any manual verification,” the petition said.