Electoral bonds are dead, but the data lives to tell the tale
₹509 crore to Tamil Nadu’s ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) through electoral bonds between October 2020 and April 2023, Election Commission data released on Sunday showed. This makes up 37% of the ₹1,368-crore worth of bonds that his company has bought since April 2019.
A letter by the DMK to the poll body, which the latter revealed on Sunday, showed that the party was a major recipient of the donations from Martin's Coimbatore-based Future Gaming and Hotel Services Pvt. Ltd, which has turned out to be the biggest buyer of India's electoral bonds as per data released by the ECI last week.
The donations given by Future Gaming, whose owner Martin has been under the Enforcement Directorate's (ED) scanner, accounted for more than 75% of the total receipts from electoral bonds of ₹676.5 crore disclosed by the DMK till January 2024, Mint calculations show. Since most political parties have not disclosed the names of the donors, it was not known who were the beneficiaries of the balance ₹859 crore worth bonds purchased by Future Gaming.
The disclosure is part of the data dump pertaining to a total of 523 recognized and non-recognized political parties made public by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the Supreme Court's orders. This followed another dataset published by the ECI last week based on the information submitted by the State Bank of India (SBI), the sole bank authorized to sell and redeem electoral bonds.
The latest dataset released by the ECI included scanned copies of the disclosures made by the political parties, running into hundreds of pages. While initially the data submitted by the SBI pertained to a period from 12 April 2019 till the scrapping of the bonds by the apex court last month, the latest
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