NEW DELHI: The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Sunday uploaded the remaining data on the purchase and redemption of electoral bonds that political parties had shared with it and which was submitted to the Supreme Court in a sealed cover. The ECI published the details after it got the sealed cover back from the apex court. Political parties had filed data on electoral bonds in sealed cover as directed by the apex court’s interim order of April 12, 2019.
The fresh disclosure by the ECI shows that only a few parties — DMK, AIADMK, JD(S), and National Conference — have revealed the name of their donors.
The poll panel’s latest disclosure is part of the data dump pertaining to a total of 523 recognised and non-recognised political parties made public on the Supreme Court’s orders. According to reports, the latest data pertain to the period before April 12, 2019. This is the second set of data that the poll panel has published. Electoral bond details after this date was made public by the poll panel last week.
“Data so received from political parties was deposited in the Supreme Court without opening sealed covers. In pursuance of the SC’s order of March 15, the Registry of the Supreme Court has returned physical copies along with a digitized record of the same in a pen drive in a sealed cover. The Election Commission has uploaded the data received in the digitized form from the registry of the Supreme Court on electoral bonds on its website,” EC said.
The fresh disclosure by the ECI is part of the data dump on a total of 523 recognised and non-recognised political parties made public following a direction by the Supreme Court. This was followed by another dataset published by the ECI last week following the data SBI shared with it. The SBI was the sole bank authorised to sell and redeem now-defunct electoral bonds.
The data show that BJP has got the highest funds through these bonds at Rs 6,986.50 crore, followed by the TMC at Rs 1,397 crore, and the Congress Rs 1,334 crore.
The latest disclosure is based on the declarations given by various political parties in November last year on the bonds redeemed by them since the scheme was launched in early 2018. It includes scanned copies of the disclosures by the political parties, running into hundreds of pages.