Citizens don't have right to know source of electoral bond funds: Centre

Attorney General R Venkataramani said that the Constitution has not conferred citizens with a fundamental right to know the source of electoral bond funds

Attorney General R Venkataramani on Sunday said that the Constitution has not conferred citizens with a fundamental right to know the source of electoral bond funds.

On petitions challenging the "opaque" electoral bond mode of funding political parties, the Attorney General said that the Supreme Court (SC) should not enter into the policy domain for regulating electoral bonds, according to a report in The Times of India (TOI)

Ahead of the October 31 hearing before a five-judge Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud, Venkataramani said, "The scheme does not impinge upon any existing right of any person and cannot be said to be repugnant to any right under Part III of the Constitution. In the absence of such repugnance, the scheme will not be illegal. A law which is not so repugnant cannot be voided for any other reason."

He added that the judicial review is not about "scanning state policies for the purposes of suggesting better or different prescriptions", according to the TOI report.

He said that the SC judgment in the People's Union for Civil Liberties case in 2003 asking candidates to declare criminal antecedents was to enable voters to make an informed choice. "The right to know the criminal antecedents of a candidate, which can be of utility and relevance to the choice of a candidate, is neither comparable to the case on hand nor can there be a general right to know anything and everything for undefined ends," the AG said.

He said the electoral bond scheme ensures that clean money is being contributed. "While reading into enumerated constitutional rights any one of their aspects (by penumbral formulation), the SC will also be alive to the need for stating relevant restrictions on the exercise of such penumbral aspects. The SC will also consider that having regard to the importance of such aspects and their impacts on the organisation of political parties and the right under Article 19(1)(c), the entire subject deserves parliamentary debates," the AG said.

He added: "Even when the court proceeds to declare an aspect as part of a right for the first time, it will be in tune with separation of powers that the subject of reviewing or testing a law with the newly stated aspect of a right be relegated to public and parliamentary debates. This is also not the case for court-driven guidelines."