Electoral bonds are dead, but the data lives to tell the tale

New Delhi: Lottery King Santiago Martin donated ₹509 crore to Tamil Nadu’s ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) through electoral bonds between October 2020 and April 2023, Election Commission data released on Sunday showed. This makes up 37% of the ₹1,368-crore worth of bonds that his company has bought since April 2019.

A letter by the DMK to the poll body, which the latter revealed on Sunday, showed that the party was a major recipient of the donations from Martin's Coimbatore-based Future Gaming and Hotel Services Pvt. Ltd, which has turned out to be the biggest buyer of India's electoral bonds as per data released by the ECI last week.

The donations given by Future Gaming, whose owner Martin has been under the Enforcement Directorate's (ED) scanner, accounted for more than 75% of the total receipts from electoral bonds of ₹676.5 crore disclosed by the DMK till January 2024, Mint calculations show.

Since most political parties have not disclosed the names of the donors, it was not known who were the beneficiaries of the balance ₹859 crore worth bonds purchased by Future Gaming.

The disclosure is part of the data dump pertaining to a total of 523 recognized and non-recognized political parties made public by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the Supreme Court's orders. This followed another dataset published by the ECI last week based on the information submitted by the State Bank of India (SBI), the sole bank authorized to sell and redeem electoral bonds. The latest dataset released by the ECI included scanned copies of the disclosures made by the political parties, running into hundreds of pages.

While initially the data submitted by the SBI pertained to a period from 12 April 2019 till the scrapping of the bonds by the apex court last month, 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, and till September 2023.

The ECI had told the Supreme Court that it could not release the full data last week since it had earlier submitted the details received from parties to the court’s registry and had not retained copies. The ECI released the full list after the court returned the material.

According to an earlier report compiled by NGO Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), electoral bonds worth ₹16,518 crore were sold from March 2018 to January 2024.

The two datasets can together be used to calculate the value of total electoral bonds encashed by each political party since inception. With this, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s cumulative donations received through electoral bonds swelled to ₹8,251.8 crore. This includes ₹6,986.5 crore encashed between March 2018 and September 2023, the period that the fresh data was for, and ₹1,264.3 crore received between October 2023 and January 2024, the data for which the ECI had already released last week.

The BJP received nearly half the funds received under the now-scrapped electoral bonds scheme. The Congress now becomes the second-biggest recipient at ₹1,952 crore, followed by the Trinamool Congress ( ₹1,705 crore), and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi ( ₹1,408 crore). The partial data released last week had put the Trinamool at the second spot.

Among the major parties that have disclosed the identity of their donors, the AIADMK got most of its donations from India Cements-owned IPL cricket team Chennai Super Kings, while the contributors to the JD(S) included the Aditya Birla Group, Infosys, the JSW Group and the Embassy Group.

Most parties did not identify donor details in their letter to the Election Commission. Among those that did, the Janata Dal (Secular) said it had received bonds worth ₹50 crore from Megha Engineering, the second largest purchaser of electoral bonds.

Other major donors of the DMK included Megha Engineering ( ₹105 crore), India Cements ₹14 crore and Sun TV ( ₹100 crore).

(With inputs from PTI)