 Thank you for that introduction. Electoral bonds have actually come to be the biggest innovation in political financing in India for the simple reason that this has legalized giving unaccounted money to political parties. And although the heading of the finance minister's speech in the budget while he presented the budget on 1st of February 2017, the title of the two paragraphs was transparency in electoral funding. But what exactly the scheme did and how it has turned out to be has been the exact opposite of transparency because the same day that he made the speech in the parliament in the afternoon the same finance minister in a media interaction said that the bond will be bearer in character to keep the donor anonymous. Since February 2016, 2017, I have been looking for a dictionary which says that anonymity and transparency are synonymous with each other and I have not yet found it. Now, after announcing the scheme and the budget, it was finally first when the budget papers were available in detail. And then finally when the notification was done almost exactly a year later on February 2018, when you read in between the lines or actually when you read the lines, it turned out that it had done a variety of things. First of all, it amended four laws, the representative of people act, the income tax act, the companies act, and the Reserve Bank Committee Act. Now, each of these the amendments, if you look at them in some detail, you find that they are not for transparency, they are anti transparency. For example, the Companies Act had a provision that no company or a company which has made profit for the last three years can donate not more than 7.5% profits to a political party or to any political party. Now, there was a limit for 7.5%. This limit of 7.5% was removed in that amendment of the Companies Act. In addition, the Companies Act also had a provision that every company had to disclose the name of the political party to which they had made donation and the amount of the donation. This requirement of disclosing the name of the company and the amount of the donation was also removed. So therefore, to say that this will achieve transparency is quite strange. At the same time, the removal of the 7.5% limit and a minor or a tweak to the FRRA around the same time which changed the definition of a foreign source made it possible for any foreign entity to set up a subsidiary in India and for the subsidiary to donate as much money as they want to any political party. Now this opened the floodgates of unaccounted foreign money going into the Indian political system. Similarly, the other amendments to the People Act, the Crypto Tax Act, etc., all they did was to close whatever little holes were there through which we could peep in and find out what the political parties are doing. In addition to this kind of thing, about two years later after that through the use of Right to Information Act, it turned out it was learned that the Reserve Bank of India and the Election Commission of India had opposed this scheme in no uncertain times. The Election Commission of India wrote a letter saying that electoral bonds in the way, shape and form that they are being introduced will encourage formation of shell companies to donate money to political parties, which obviously is not what anybody wanted. The RBI said that RBI is the only authority in the country to issue currency and the electoral bonds are supposed to be like currency because if somebody buys the electoral bond and gives it to a political party or to give it to a person X buys a bond, gives it to Y, Y gives it to Z, Z gives it to Z, or Z gives it to X, etc. And then finally it lined with the political party within 60 days of purchase. It is it is knowledge. It is as good as currency. So the RBI had tested against this but the objections of the RBI and the Election Commission of India were overruled by the Finance Ministry and the kinds of noting that Finance Ministry officials made on the files are actually quite amusing, saying that the RBI does not seem to have understood what was the intention behind this. And the Election Commission were called and they have understood and they have decided to draw their objections whereas there has been no withdrawal of that. So against such objections by the statutory or by the constitutional authorities, the scheme was introduced. As soon as the scheme was introduced, it several things came out. One was that it was said that it was completely anonymous. The bonds will not be identifiable or traceable in any way. A journalist from the Quint bought an electoral bond and put it through forensic testing and it was revealed that there was a unique alphanumeric number that the electoral bond held which became visible only under ultraviolet light. So this contention that these were completely anonymous and they were could not be traceable, could not be traced in any way, shape or form was proved to be wrong. Number two, the provision was or still is that the State Bank of India is the only bank who is to sell these bonds through authorized branches during a 10-day window every quarter in the year. So in government issued a notification, let's say from the 1st of January to the 10th of January, State Bank of India will sell these bonds through designated branch. Now it also said that the State Bank of India will collect KYC or know your customer particulars but will not share it with anyone at all unless somebody brings a court order and therefore the anonymity of the buyer will remain confidential. Now who any observer of this kind of an activity, it is obvious that the State Bank of India, first of all if State Bank of India was not to share this information with anybody at all, why would State Bank of India collect? Anyway to say that State Bank of India will collect information and State Bank of India will not reveal this information to the Finance Ministry and the Finance Ministry will not release it to its Minister is something that is not believable at least to me if not to anybody else. So it was the mechanism turned out to be very simple that if a person buys electoral bonds of any amount from the State Bank of India and heads or starts moving towards the office of a different political party than the ruling party. The apprehension was that the State Bank of India's information about the buyer will go to the Finance Ministry and to the Finance Minister and to the party to which the Finance Minister belongs. It is independent of any party which is in power. So at the moment the information goes that XYZ has bought these bonds and the person is headed to a different political party. It was speculated that the phone call will go to the person and he or she will be asked so you have bought these bonds where are you planning to donate to a sensitive political party donator. This would be enough and the person will then move toward the political party in power and donate all those bonds there. So the apprehension was that electoral bonds the way they have been operationalized through this information being available ostensibly only to the State Bank of India had the potential of joking the funding for all opposition parties. Now this was expressed in the apprehension in February 2018 and subsequently when the data of the sales of electoral bonds for the first year first full year became available because political parties had to declare it in their statement of income and expenditure. It was proved that 95% of the amount of bonds purchased in that year were donated to the political party in power. 200 and I think 15 crores worth of bonds were bought. 200 were donated to the political party in power. I think 10 crores were donated to the next biggest party and five crores strangely were not in cash and the scheme has a provision that if any bonds are not in cash in 15 days that amount gets related to the prime minister's relief fund. So in the first year 95% of the funding through electoral bonds went to the ruling party in the subsequent years it has become a little less somewhere around 70% or so. So 70% roughly of the funding through electoral bonds goes to the ruling party. Now when ruling party has this monopoly of money obviously the ruling party has the monopoly of contested elections or I should say winning the elections because rightly or wrongly money has started to play a huge part in the electoral process. Now as soon as the scheme came to be known the association for democratic reforms with whom I work we filed a petition in the Supreme Court in August of 2017. There were many reasons one of the main reasons was that the electoral bonds were introduced as a part of the budget and the budget is a money bill and a money bill's peculiarity is that the money bill is discussed in the Lok Sabha and you know members make suggestions for modifications or amendments etc and then once the Lok Sabha has passed it it goes to the Rajya Sabha. In the Rajya Sabha the money bills are only discussed. The Rajya Sabha does not have the power to make any amendments to the bills. So effectively if there is a majority in the Lok Sabha then the government of the day can pass any bill they want because if they have majority in the Lok Sabha even if they are in minority in the Rajya Sabha, Rajya Sabha cannot amend any of the money bills. Now the definition of the money bill under the constitution is that money bills by and large are those which deal with expenditure and contributions to the consolidated fund of India. Now the electoral bonds have nothing to do with the consolidated fund of India. Anybody any citizen, any company can buy the bond from the state bank of India and give it to a political party which deposits it in a designated account. So consolidated fund of India has nothing to do with electoral bonds and therefore legally electoral bonds do not qualify to be part of a money bill and that makes the the entire process constitutionally untenable. So the introduction of electoral bond scheme was unconstitutional. This was the first issue in our petition and of course there were many others which which I do not think I should list here. So the petition was filed on August in August 2017. It was heard first theory was held on October 3, 2017 and after that it kind of seemed to go to a cold storage. Then we kept filing applications after another but when the information about the Reserve Bank of India and the Election Commission of India opposing the scheme came out then we filed another application in March of 2019. As a result of that application a hearing was held on April 12 actually the hearing was held on April 10, 11 and 12. Now on April 12, the Supreme Court bench headed by the Chief Justice wrote the following and I quote, all that we would like to state for the present is that the rival contentions are rival contentions give rise to weighty issues which have a tremendous bearing on the sanctity of the electoral process in the country. I would like to repeat these this part of the sentence contentions give rise to weighty issues which have a tremendous bearing on the sanctity of the electoral process in the country. Such weighty issues would require an in-depth hearing which cannot be concluded and the issues answered within the limited time available so-and-so. Now April 12, 2019 the petition raised weighty issues which had a tremendous bearing on the sanctity of the electoral process in the country. From 2019 April we are now in I think we are in 2022, three years past the Supreme Court has not had time to to consider these weighty issues and the sale of electoral bonds has continued. Every time a new scheme is to be is anticipated to be issued we file an application for an urgent hearing but we have I think filed about five or six applications by this time but nothing is now the Supreme Court seems to be in a in a in a stumble or whatever I may say there was a hearing subsequently which were turned out to be very perfunctory and the order that the bench issued unfortunately very clearly indicated that they had not understood what the issues were. So situation is that something like 8 to 9,000 crores of rupees have been given to political parties primarily to the political party in power and unaccounted money foreign money from any source whatsoever continues to flow into political parties and Indian democracy very soon I don't know even if it must have been done even now will be controlled by money the source of which will not be known. Now this is not a very happy or a healthy prospect for any democracy but the other parties yes one political party has filed a petition in the Supreme Court with us but all of the political parties pay lip service to opposing the scheme but they also are kind of hopeful that when their time comes they will also be able to get some donations and therefore they are they go they are ambivalent about these parts. This is very unfortunate the the the control of money of from any source on political system of the country is now legal and that I don't think I need to say anymore. I have finished thank you very much any questions I'll be trying to answer them. Thank you Mr Chokrak. Yes I think there is a question what reforms does political financing require? Would state funding elections help? State funding elections is a is a is a very interesting phenomenon which has been talked about for a very long time. The first misunderstanding here is the world state funding when we say the state will fund elections the question to be asked is where does the state get money from and on very very quick reflection we would realize that it is the money that it gets from citizens by way of taxes etc. So I have argued for the last three four years and now some people have come to accept this that this should be called public funding of elections. While this may seem to be just a semantic change but there are any number of examples where in India unfortunately the phenomenon seems to be that anything which is governmental is free in a in an election of the municipal corporation there was a meeting of candidates kind of a public meeting with candidates of all political parties and his candidate was asked what is what will you do and one candidate said because this was in a kind of a slum area where unauthorized colonies one candidate said that our leader has given us the slogan so anything which is governmental is considered to be free therefore if we call it state funding the common person in the speed does not get disturbed by but if we call it public funding then I think people view would be slightly different anyway this is one issue the difficult well technically or philosophically it is perfectly all right because people are supposed to contest elections for doing public service therefore they should not spend their own money they should spend public money that's perfectly fine but the question there are there are two issues here if we decide that from next year we will have public funding of elections now one thing that we would need to do is to set out a budget how much money could be provided for the state funding of elections now in the government and in most other places that I know it is based on estimates and one source of estimate is what did we spend on it last time and then you add some you know 10 percent 15 percent 50 percent 200 percent but you need the figure out what how much did we spend on this so that would require political parties and candidates to reveal how much did they actually spend now then there is an argument that candidates are required to give election expenditure affidavits and they can tell us how much they spend now I can tell you that in the 2009 Lok Sabha election we analyzed the election expenditure affidavits of 6753 candidates at that time the limit was I think about 15 or 16 lakhs only four candidates out of 6,573 said that they had exceeded the limit only four 30 candidates said that they had spent about 90 percent of the limit so 6753 minus 34 is 6719 they said that they had spent between 45 to 5 percent of the limit and chief election commissioner at that time said that if this is the case we should reduce this limit and not increase it every time the point of sharing this actual data is that every candidate lies when they give these election expenditure affidavits lying is a is a non-unparliamentary word the isopropyl parliamentary word is a underreport and these there is no limit on the expenditure of political parties so how will we operationalize public funding is the problem that I am not able to solve the other issue is that if public funding is given to political parties or candidates for fighting elections it stands to reason that they should not accept any other money if they will take public funding and also continue to take other funding then the whole purpose is lost and it becomes like throwing good money after bad money it's like telling a government employee who will only have to taking bribes that we will increase your you will increase your salary five times to stop taking bribes unlikely to happen so state public funding is a very good idea but it is in the current situation not the only way to control election expenditure is there are two ways of controlling it one is that political parties have to become democratic in their internal functioning including choosing their candidates today choosing the candidates is a is a is a the greater mystery on us why they are chosen apparently for something called winability what winability is nobody seems to know so it is that is where a lot of money changes hands and the other is that political parties have to be transparent in their financial affairs political parties claim that they deal with public issues and they work with the public will work for the public but therefore if they do that then they should also be willing to share information about how much money do they get whom do they get it from how do they spend it and how much do they spend but as i said the electoral bonds are the now the world standard for opacity of political funding therefore we are not moving in the right direction at all this is all i can say in answer to this question me thank you so we have a question in the chat which is how did corporate funding to political parties work before electoral bonds were introduced that worked very well the the law was that any donation that the political party received which was more than 20000 rupees would have to be disclosed in a statement of donations so the political party at work this way that either operates gave 19999 checks about 200 400 times or they gave whatever they wanted in cash it is a personal experience of mine that i was on a television debate with a politician and a corporate person the politician said we want to take money through check but the corporate sector does not want to give it by check the corporate person said we want to give it by check but they don't want to take it by check now after i experienced that i i said to think about how could that be reconciled and then after some thought it occurred to me that the reason is that if money donations are made by check then the amounts are clear and laid down if it is through cash let us say i am a politician which i know i think i would say i am a corporate sector person and you are a politician and we meet and you say i need you know 10 crore rupees and i said that we will send it to you and i send my person with 10000 crores of cash this person does not meet you personally but he gives it to he or she gives it to one of your assistants and the person says that you know says he has given me only 9 crore so the political party person will take 9 crores and tell his or her boss that says he has sent only 8 crore so there is a question of or there is a personal interest and this is part of the reason or this may be part of the reason why every election we see that the wealth or assets of politicians increase 200 times 500 times 6000 times where does that come from possibly this is the source and it suits both sides there is a corporate sector and political sector nexus and it worked that way but this has now legalized it earlier there was some some kind of i suppose shame is a very strong word but some kind of embarrassment but now there is nothing it's perfectly above all okay and just one last question is there a precedent of this kind of electoral funding elsewhere in the world and what kind of implications have we seen occurring elsewhere when electoral bonds have been put in place say political funding all over the world is murky there is no denying that in some countries with i don't want to name it is it is even worse than us but the question is and in those countries where it is a little better than us there are better disclosure norms and there is better enforcement of the laws here unfortunately we are making laws in the guise of providing transparency and creating complete opacity so the question is political parties and i must say the corporate sector they are not interested in transparency it serves their selfish partisan short-term interests and they are not willing to look at long-term national interests unfortunately