On Thursday night, in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling, the Election Commission of India made available all the information regarding the Electoral Bonds. The document spanning pages showed the various corporates which had purchased from the SBI, as well as the bond receivers. As soon as the ECI released this data a frenzy of allegations and counter allegations started.
Decoding The Controversy..
Mr. Zubair, the fact-checker, started the frenzy by accusing BJP of buying vaccines from the Serum Institute in return for donations.
Soon after others started posting similar allegations.
CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG !!
Govt. Procured Covid Vaccine #Covishield from Serum Institute of India.
In Return, Serum Institute of India donated 50 crores to BJP via electoral bonds.
Hmm !! pic.twitter.com/qniXgPa87Y
— Mahua Moitra Fans (@MahuaMoitraFans) March 14, 2024
Vaccine wale, lottery wale 150 crore BJP ko kyon de rahe hain? Badle mein kya kaam karwaya hai 18-18 Sewak ji se? #ElectoralBondsCase https://t.co/GuZZULRqTS
— Rofl Gandhi 2.0 🏹 (@RoflGandhi_) March 14, 2024
However, first of all, Serum Institute’s name does not appear in the list published by the ECI. It didn’t make any donations through electoral bonds! The screenshots which they have shared is based on a report released by Reuters. Moreover, electoral trusts are different from electoral bonds.
Electoral trusts is a different form of making donations to the political parties wherein the companies make contributions to the trust which in turn gives money to the parties for election expenses. While the data pertaining to electoral bonds was kept anonymous until Supreme Court ordered its publication. The Election Commission routinely publishes Electoral Trust data on its website. Donations made via Electoral Trusts are exempt from taxes and are therefore popular among corporations.
Besides, the report published by Reuters itself states, “Reuters used public records from 2018-2023 to track flows from some of India’s largest companies.” In other words, they used data which is already readily available in the public domain and it is not a some new disclosure.
Furthermore, the trust report shows that the Serum Institute donated Rs 50 crore to Prudent in August 2022, which they could have further donated to the BJP. However, they made this donation over two years after introducing Covishield. By August 2022, Indians had already received over two billion doses of the vaccines. Besides, the allegation that the government didn’t approve other COVID-19 vaccines in exchange of the donation seems baseless. This is on account of the fact that several COVID Vaccines have been approved by the government apart from Covishield. Some of them are – Covaxin, Sputnik, ZyCoV-D, BBV154, Corbevax, Covovax etc. The one not approved was Pfizer vaccine.
All in all, even a cursory glance of the various trust reports suggests that BJP is the major recipient of donations in white through electoral trusts. Besides, the reality remains that the Congress government introduced this scheme in 2013.
The Funding Allegations-
Next in line were accusations of BJP being the largest recipient of the electoral bonds. Many started tweeting on it immediately after the release of the data. One such tweet being shown below.
However, if we take the total amount of donations collected that is reportedly Rs 20,000 crore. Then out of this Rs 20,000 crore BJP received approximately Rs 6000 crore. What about the remaining 14,000 crore? Reportedly, Trinamool Congress received bonds worth Rs 1,600 crore, Congress Rs 1,400 crore, Bharat Rashtra Samithi received Rs 1,200 crore, BJD received Rs 775 crore and DMK received Rs 649 crore.
But if we factor in the number of MP’s per party then the the funds received by BJP per MP is far less than other parties. Considering BJP has 290 MP’s ( as given in Digital Sansad) then per MP it received around Rs 20.9 crore, Congress approximately 29.16 crore, TMC about Rs 72.72 crore, DMK about Rs 27.04 crore, BJD about Rs 64.58 crore and BRS about Rs 200 crore.
Such tweets have been misleading for BJP got less than 48% of the total bonds not 55% as claimed. While the party which is in power in just one state, that is, TMC received approximately 13% of the total amount. Similarly Congress which is in power in just three states and got less than 10% of the seats, encashed 11% of the electoral bonds. This is something to ponder upon.
Overall,
The supreme court has scrapped the electoral bonds scheme, and while one can debate on whether it was good or bad. The fact remains that all the parties received donations via electoral bonds. The data is out in the public domain so if its a scam then aren’t all parties guilty of it? Last but not the least, there are lot of controversial and speculative statements being made like the above mentioned. In my humble opinion one should maneuver around them with due diligence.