The State Bank of India (SBI) has asked the Supreme Court time till June 30 to provide details of electoral bonds. While SBI moves sluggishly in disclosing the names of those who played secret santas to political parties saying it is a laborious task, the bank has in the past displayed stunning agility in fulfilling similar government inquiries.

Days after the court struck down the contentious fund-raising scheme that granted anonymity to donors of political parties, and asked SBI, which issued the bonds, to divulge donor details, the bank told the court it would take months for it to match the buyer of the bonds with beneficiary parties.

But in a trove of documents, which transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra had shared with The Collective and formed the basis of a series of investigative exposes on electoral bonds in 2019 and 2020, there are many pieces of pivotal evidence that prove SBI raced to provide data on electoral bonds to the government in the shortest possible time, sometimes in merely 48 hours.

The documents reveal that SBI, on Union Finance Ministry’s beckoning, was able to collate data on electoral bonds from across the country within 48 hours after the deadline to encash the bonds ended. It sent such information religiously to the Union finance ministry after every window period of sale. The Collective verified such missives being sent up to 2020. 

The SBI maintains an audit trail of the bonds being sold, and redeemed by political parties, show documents.

The trail is maintained using a serial number on each bond. The bank had insisted upon a serial number when the Union government launched the electoral bond scheme in 2018.

The bank, which showed alacrity in arming the Union government with electoral bond data, has now told the court, to buy time, that the data on donors of electoral bonds is kept in a separate ‘silo’ from the data on political parties that got the bonds.  

SBI asserts that data from branches on the sale of bonds is sent to its Mumbai headquarters in sealed covers. Likewise, data on political parties that encashed the bonds is sent by designated branches in sealed cover. The bank said the data on sale and encashment is decoupled to maintain anonymity.  So, according to the largest government-owned bank, it would take months to match the buyers of a total of 22,217 electoral bonds issued since 2019 with the beneficiary parties.

But documents show the Union Finance Ministry admitted internally in 2017 that the SBI could in real time connect the donor with the political party receiving the money when the electoral bonds “come for encashment” to the bank, regardless of whether the bonds were sold and redeemed electronically or in physical form.

What made it possible is that each electoral bond was sold only after a detailed exercise by the SBI branches to identify the buyer – called Know Your Customer or KYC process  – and the existence of hidden serial numbers on the bonds.

The government, while defending itself before the Supreme Court against accusations of creating an opaque political funding route, said the scheme envisages a transparent system of acquiring bonds with validated KYC and an audit trail. In its internal deliberations on how to defend the scheme in the court, the finance ministry noted, “The records of the purchaser are always available in the banking channel and may be retrieved as and when required by enforcement agencies.”

SBI’s petition in the Supreme Court seeking more time has spawned countless memes mocking it for treating the apex court with the same characteristic laggardness it is accused of while dealing with customers.

Not always. It was quick and responsive when collating information for the government at short notice, with turning time for decisions being just a phone call long.

For example, once in 2018, a political party approached SBI’s New Delhi branch wanting to redeem specific bonds that were past their shelf life. The Delhi branch informed the Transaction Banking Unit, a specific team in the SBI corporate office in Mumbai, within hours.

The life of an electoral bond – from printing to redemption – is overseen by the specific team, earlier called TBU. They collated information for the government at short notice and kept the finance ministry mandarins in the loop on trends in electoral bonds.

Since law said an electoral bond had a shelf life of only 15 days, the SBI corporate office reached out to the finance ministry for advice. The ministry quickly responded that the bank should allow the political party to encash the bonds even though they had expired. The corporate office moved with lightning speed and told the Delhi office to do so. All of this happened in a span of 24 hours, allowing the political party to encash the expired electoral bonds.

Neither the finance ministry nor the SBI mentioned on official records the name of the political party that received the favour. But the SBI knew and informed the finance ministry that the party had 10 expired bonds of 1 crore each and the specific dates on which they had been bought in Delhi.

Though formally an independent entity, SBI has on several occasions acted as the government’s extension.  In 2018, it took permission from the finance ministry to share data on bonds under the Right to Information Act. 

This history raises questions about the reason behind the delay in furnishing the details sought by the apex court. 

The answer perhaps comes from Subhash Chandra Garg, a retired government official. As the Finance and Economics Affairs secretary, he oversaw the formulation and implementation of the Electoral Bonds scheme in 2017 and 2018. 

On March 6 , Mojo Story asked Garg if the SBI had a legit case to ask for more time. He said, “To my mind, it is the lamest excuse which SBI has put in (before the Supreme Court)....It doesn’t require silos to be reconciled or connected etc…for furnishing this information the SBI needs no time at all. What SBI seems to be saying is that we will connect the buyers of the bonds and the recipients of the bonds…even for doing that information, which is not required, the SBI will not take any more time. As I said earlier, every bond has one number so if you sort the information on this number you can get the information very easily …possibly the SBI has been motivated to file this application.”

Garg should know. He was the one who oversaw the embedding of the hidden serial numbers on the electoral bonds as SBI demanded.