Supreme Court
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, February 16: The Central government through the Solicitor General had argued before the Supreme Court that there are reasonable restrictions on citizens’ right to know. The Supreme Court in a unanimous decision trashed all the outlandish arguments of the top government lawyer in defence of the electoral bonds.
Former Finance Minister Arun Jaitely was the moral god of the Narendra Modi government in the first tenure. He invented arguments in defence of the acts of the government out of the thin air, and repeated them forcefully with such frequency that the audience believed them as 24-carrot truth. In his reflective voices, he would regale a jam-packed chamber in his parliament office with journalists taking each inch by arguing that “politics is full of people who have no sources of income, and thus they become tools for malpractices to eke out their livelihoods.
Jaitely would also argue that “the political funding needs to be cleansed of black money for guiding the electoral exercises to clean money”. The electoral bond scheme was a brainchild of Jaitely. He brought the scheme as the finance minister. There were hardly any scrutiny by the parliamentary standing committee, and the Opposition reservations were dismissed as usual as a lament of losers.
Former Union Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Sangh died a broken heart. He hailed from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). Still, he is remembered as the finest Union Minister for Rural Development. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held him in high esteem. It was to his credit that the rural India firmly got into the centre stage of the central funding in budgets.
In the last conversation with this author, Singh was teary-eyed while recalling the Lok Sabha elections of 2019. He was aghast at the amount of money spent in the elections. He said that it was not beyond the imagination for the people like him to contest elections. It may be noted that the 2019 Lok Sabha elections took place after two years of the launch of the electoral bond scheme which swelled the financial might of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which is said to have garnered over 50 per cent of the total contributions made so far.
Forner Chief Election Commissioner S Y Qureshi in an article in The Indian Express has given details of the serious objections by the Reserve Bank of India and the EC against the electoral bonds while they were all overruled by the government. Qureshi also recalled that the Modi government amended law retrospectively to insulate political parties from foreign funding. Ironically, citizens can invite the FEMA ire if they receive foreign contributions for their activities even for a social cause.
In times of the Covid-19, right of the citizens to know was evidently put to restrictions on the funding of the funds specially created during the episode with kitty swelling fast from contributions. The RTI applications nowadays are summarily dismissed by departments by inventing alibi. In most of the cases, vague reasons are cited in denying information. The Supreme Court has indeed asserted that democracy is the basic structure of the Constitution, and the right to know is central to democratic functioning of the country.
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