Friday, March 24, 2017

Electoral bonds

Facts:
Electoral bond can be purchased by any donor only by cheque or electronic payment, only at authorised banks. You can donate these bonds only to a political party. These are redeemable in only one account of that party, registered with the Election Commission.

Donor gets tax benefits.

Further government has removed previous limitation of 7.5% of profits to donate to political parties.

Mr Jaitley's opinion:
The advantage of the electoral bond system over donations through cheques, Mr Jaitley said, was that many donors expressed reluctance to use cheques because it becomes transparent and leads to political vendetta by rivals. The other reason that donors did not want their names to be known was that, following the donation, if they legitimately win a contract, then they open themselves up to suspicion of benefiting from a quid pro quo arrangement with the party in power.
“Our system is a multi-party democracy. You will have a cost of parties, and cost of running elections,” Mr Jaitley said. “And parties do not conduct business. So they raise donations. The question is how do they do this in a transparent manner.”

Questions:
How does electoral bond create a transparent system of political donation when who purchased the electoral bonds and contributed to which party is not available in public domain? Instead the task of maintaining secrecy of political donations has been transferred to banks from political parties?

It seems political parties are more concerned with maintaining secrecy of donors than revealing to public their actual sources of contribution.

Further now irrespective of profit earned companies can donate to political parties any amount. Now the company does not have electoral representation in democracy, then why should it fund political representatives? Wouldn't it be better that political parties who are supposed to work for the benefit of people only raise money through people personally?

Sources
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/explaining-electoral-bonds-in-india/article9524904.ece

http://www.thehindu.com/business/electoral-bonds-to-flag-elections-fm/article17429558.ece

https://youtu.be/hEAUkb3aN2k

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/the-hindu-explains-what-is-an-electoral-bond-and-how-do-we-get-one/article22367124.ece

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