On 15 February 2024, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court struck down the 2018 Electoral Bond Scheme as unconstitutional, holding that anonymous, unlimited corporate and individual donations to political parties violated voters’ right to information under Article 19(1)(a).

The Court directed the State Bank of India — the scheme’s sole issuer — to stop issuing bonds and to disclose the identities of buyers and the parties that redeemed them.

What the disclosed data showed

According to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), individuals and companies had bought bonds worth about ₹16,518 crore up to November 2023. Analyses of the data found that a large majority of bond money over the scheme’s life went to the governing party, with opposition parties receiving substantially smaller shares.

The significance isn’t which party benefited most — it’s that, for the first time, citizens could see the flows at all. The scheme had been designed so they could not.

Why it matters beyond one election

Transparent political funding is a structural safeguard: it lets voters judge whether policy follows money. The verdict re-established that principle. The open question now is what replaces electoral bonds — and whether any successor keeps donor transparency intact rather than restoring anonymity by another name.