State Bank of India’s Challenge in Revealing Political Donations

The Reporters’ Collective Examines Autonomy of SBI

Newsreel Asia Insight #155
March 9, 2024

The State Bank of India (SBI) has requested the Supreme Court to extend the deadline to June 30 for providing details of electoral bonds. The request comes after the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a fund-raising scheme that allowed political donors to remain anonymous, demanding SBI to disclose the donor details. SBI claims that matching bond buyers with beneficiary political parties is a time-consuming process. Is this claim believable?

The Reporters’ Collective has documents, shared by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra, which reveal that SBI has previously provided detailed data on electoral bonds to the Union Finance Ministry promptly, sometimes within 48 hours after the sale period ended. This data included branch-wise details of bonds bought and redeemed, both physically and electronically.

The bank has told the Court that donor information is stored separately from the recipient political parties’ data, maintaining that sales data is dispatched to its Mumbai headquarters in sealed envelopes, and similarly, information on political parties redeeming the bonds is sent from specific branches in sealed envelopes. The bank explains that this separation of sales and redemption data ensures anonymity. Consequently, SBI indicates that reconciling the data to match the 22,217 electoral bonds sold since 2019 with their respective political party recipients would take several months.Top of Form

According to the Collective, SBI maintains an audit trail of electoral bonds, using serial numbers on each bond to track sales and redemptions by political parties. Despite this, SBI has told the court that donor data is stored separately from recipient data, implying a lengthy process to match the two.

Internal documents from the Union Finance Ministry from 2017 indicate that SBI can connect donors with recipient political parties in real-time during bond encashment, the Collective says, adding that this is facilitated by the Know Your Customer (KYC) process and hidden serial numbers on the bonds.

The Collective suggests that SBI’s delay in providing the Supreme Court with electoral bond data may be deliberate, as indicated by former Finance and Economics Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg.

“To my mind, it is the lamest excuse which SBI has put in (before the Supreme Court)....It doesn’t require silos to be reconciled or connected etc…for furnishing this information the SBI needs no time at all,” Garg told Mojo Story. “What SBI seems to be saying is that we will connect the buyers of the bonds and the recipients of the bonds…even for doing that information, which is not required, the SBI will not take any more time. As I said earlier, every bond has one number so if you sort the information on this number you can get the information very easily …possibly the SBI has been motivated to file this application.”

The Collective remarks, “Though formally an independent entity, SBI has on several occasions acted as the government’s extension.  In 2018, it took permission from the finance ministry to share data on bonds under the Right to Information Act.”

The president of the Congress party, Mallikarjun Kharge, called the electoral bonds scheme “opaque, undemocratic and (which) destroyed the level playing field,” according to Mint, which quoted him as saying that “Modi government is using the largest bank of our country as a shield to hide its dubious dealings through Electoral Bonds.”

The tenure of the current Lok Sabha will end on June 16, and the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to furnish the details by June 30, Kharge said. “Isn’t the government conveniently hiding the BJP’s shady dealings where contracts of highways, ports, airports, power plants etc. were handed over to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cronies in lieu of these opaque electoral bonds.”