The Supreme Court on Monday made it clear that its February 15 directive to the SBI to disclose identities of the donors and recipients of the now-scrapped electoral bonds scheme must be complied with in "black and white".
The ruling gives the lie to claims made by some social media users that the court had modified its earlier order and given a "breather" to the government.
When the SBI, represented by senior advocate Harish Salve, said it needed more time to "match donor details with (those of) political parties", Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said the bank had not been asked to do any matching but simply to "disclose the available details".
"Simply open up the sealed cover, collate the names and furnish details," Justice Sanjiv Khanna, one of the judges on the five-judge constitution bench, added.
Salve argued that the SBI needed “a little more time” to comply with the court order as it did not want to commit “any havoc” or “mistake” by disclosing information without proper verification.
“We are having to collate all the information. Our process made sure that there was no correlation between the KYC, bond numbers,” Salve said. “We need to be able to match donor details with political parties.”
Justice Chandrachud responded with: “We have not told you (in the February 15 judgment) to match donor KYC with political parties. We have only asked for you to disclose the available details to the Election Commission.
“The SBI can simply comply with the judgment by disclosing information available with it. There are no grounds for seeking extension. You have all the KYC details. All the details are already available in the main branch of the SBI. SBI can simply open up the sealed covers and correlate the information.”
The bench asked: “In the last 26 days, what progress has been made on matching? The SBI should have disclosed (the) extent of progress made with matching. There is nothing mentioned about it in the application. We are given to understand, that there is a number assigned to electoral bonds.”
Salve said: “That number is kept a secret; to generate the number we need to match details.”
Justice Chandrachud remarked: “You are saying that there are two different information silos and rematching them would require significant effort. But if you see the directions, we issued, we did not ask you to do this matching exercise. We have simply directed plain disclosure.”
Salve said: “If a bridge does not need to be established between the two, we can disclose the information in three weeks. We have the details; I am not saying we don’t have them. We were told this was supposed to be secret. We don’t want now to create any havoc by any mistake.”
Justice Khanna interjected to say: “There is no question of any mistake. You have the KYC. You are the Number 1 bank in the country. We expect you to handle it.”
He added: “It was your (SBI’s) submissions that all the purchasing details were kept in a sealed cover at the main branch. You just need to simply open up the sealed cover, collate the names and furnish details.”
