Poll funding: If voted back to power, Nirmala hints at reinstating electoral bonds
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: If voted back to power after the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, the NDA government is likely to reinstate corporate funding to political parties through controversial electoral bonds.
According to the media reports, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman hinted at this possibility, stating to bring in a political funding framework acceptable to all stakeholders after wide-ranging consultations for transparency and to curb black money in polls.
While speaking to HindustanTimes, she said, “We still have to do a lot of consultation with stakeholders and see what is it that we have to do to make or bring in a framework which will be acceptable to all, primarily retain the level of transparency and completely remove the possibility of black money entering into this.”
She did, however, add that the Union government has not yet decided whether to seek a review of the recent ruling of the Supreme Court (SC).
Sitharaman said “What the scheme, thrown out by the Supreme Court, brought in was transparency. What prevailed earlier was just free-for-all.”
While acknowledging that certain aspects of the scheme needed improvement, she said they might be brought back in some form following “a good consultation.”
Earlier also, she defended the electoral bonds scheme, stating that it was “one step better than what went before”.
During an interview with The New Indian Express, the FM had said, the BJP regime brought the law “to clean up electoral financing”. “Electoral funding will have to go through a lot more transparency.”
The Centre introduced the electoral bond scheme on January 2, 2018, as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties to bring transparency in political funding. In February 2024, however, a five-judge constitution bench of the apex court declared it as unconstitutional.
