TL;DR: On 15 February 2024, a unanimous five-judge Constitution Bench struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme of 2018 in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India (2024 INSC 113), holding that anonymous political funding violates voters’ right to information under Article 19(1)(a). The scheme failed a four-stage proportionality test, and the amendment removing limits on corporate donations was separately struck down as manifestly arbitrary under Article 14.

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What the Electoral Bonds Scheme actually was

To understand the judgment, you need to understand what the scheme did in practice, because the constitutional problem was partly a feature, not a bug.

The Electoral Bond Scheme was notified by the Ministry of Finance on 2 January 2018. Its mechanism was simple. Any person or company could walk into a designated branch of the State Bank of India during one of the periodic sale windows (January, April, July, and October each year) and buy bearer instruments called electoral bonds. These came in denominations of Rs 1,000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh, and Rs 1 crore. The buyer paid by cheque or digital transfer, so the transaction went through the banking system. The bond itself, however, carried no name. It was a bearer instrument, meaning whoever held it could redeem it.

A registered political party with at least one percent of the votes polled in the most recent general or state assembly election could maintain a verified account with SBI and deposit bonds within fifteen days of issuance. The party then got the cash.

The defining feature was information asymmetry by design. The donor’s identity was known only to SBI, which held KYC records. It was not disclosed to the Election Commission of India, not disclosed to the recipient party (in any formal legal sense), and not disclosed to the public. The scheme’s architects positioned this as a privacy protection: donors who feared political retaliation for backing the opposition would be more willing to contribute through a formal banking channel rather than in cash.

Between the scheme’s launch in March 2018 and its suspension in January 2024, a total of approximately Rs 16,518 crore worth of electoral bonds was sold across thirty tranches, according to figures cited in Parliament and later confirmed through the ECI disclosures.

The statutory architecture: Finance Acts of 2016 and 2017

The scheme did not rest on a single standalone law. It was built by amending several existing statutes, which is why the Supreme Court had to examine multiple provisions and strike them down one by one.

Finance Act, 2016 amended the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act to allow foreign companies with majority Indian shareholding to donate to political parties. This change later became one of the grounds of challenge, though the principal battle in the 2024 judgment focused on the 2017 amendments.

Finance Act, 2017 carried the core amendments:

  • Section 11 amended Section 13A of the Income Tax Act, 1961, which previously required political parties to maintain and publish records of contributions received. The amendment exempted electoral bond contributions from this requirement, meaning parties receiving bonds did not have to account for them in their income tax returns in the usual way.

  • Section 135 amended Section 31 of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, authorising the government to allow a scheduled bank (SBI) to issue electoral bonds. Ordinarily the RBI Act restricts who can issue bearer instruments.

  • Section 137 amended Section 29C of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which had required parties to file “Contribution Reports” disclosing the names of donors giving more than Rs 20,000. The amendment carved out electoral bond donations entirely: parties were no longer required to disclose them in these contribution reports.

  • Section 154 amended Section 182 of the Companies Act, 2013 in two significant ways. First, it removed the cap that had limited corporate political donations to 7.5 percent of the company’s average net profits over the preceding three financial years. Second, it removed the requirement that companies disclose party-wise contribution amounts in their profit-and-loss accounts. Before the amendment, shareholders could see how much a company had donated and to which party. After it, they could not.

Taken together, these four amendments created a closed loop of non-disclosure. Donors were anonymous to the public and to the ECI. Parties did not have to report bond receipts in contribution reports. Companies did not have to disclose donations to shareholders. And there was no ceiling on how much any company could give.

For a broader look at how statutory amendments passed through Finance Bills have changed the legal landscape in India, the post on India’s new criminal laws covers a parallel exercise in legislative restructuring through omnibus legislation.

Who challenged it, and when

The litigation started before the scheme was even formally launched.

Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a civil society organisation focused on electoral transparency, filed a writ petition in September 2017 challenging the Finance Act amendments as soon as they were passed. ADR had already established its credentials as a petitioner in the earlier landmark case Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms (2002), where the Supreme Court had first recognised that voters have a right to information about candidates’ criminal and financial backgrounds.

Common Cause, another public interest organisation, filed a parallel petition.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) became the only registered political party to challenge the scheme, filing its own writ petition in January 2018.

All three matters were tagged and heard together. The lead counsels for the petitioners included Advocate Prashant Bhushan, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, and Advocate Shadan Farasat, among others.

The case had a long gestation. An early hearing before a bench led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi in April 2019 produced only a direction that political parties submit their electoral bond details in sealed envelopes to the ECI, without any stay on the scheme’s operation. In March 2021, under Chief Justice S.A. Bobde, the Court again declined to stay the scheme. The matter kept being listed and then deferred, while the bonds continued to be issued and redeemed across successive tranches.

The constitutional significance finally received its due when Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, on 16 October 2023, referred the case to a five-judge Constitution Bench, noting the importance of the questions of law involved. The bench heard arguments over three days from 31 October to 2 November 2023, and reserved judgment.

The Constitution Bench and what it was asked to decide

The five-judge bench that delivered the February 2024 judgment comprised:

  1. Chief Justice Dr. D.Y. Chandrachud (who also authored the lead judgment)
  2. Justice Sanjiv Khanna (who wrote a separate concurring opinion)
  3. Justice B.R. Gavai
  4. Justice J.B. Pardiwala
  5. Justice Manoj Misra

The decision was unanimous. All five judges agreed that the scheme was unconstitutional. The two separate opinions differed in reasoning and emphasis but reached the same outcome.

The broad questions before the bench were:

  • Whether anonymity in political funding violates voters’ right to information protected under Article 19(1)(a).
  • Whether unlimited corporate donations, after the Section 182 Companies Act amendment, violate Article 14 as manifestly arbitrary.
  • Whether the exemption from disclosure in contribution reports under Section 29C of the RPA violated constitutional provisions on free and fair elections.
  • Whether the Finance Act 2016 amendment to FCRA, permitting foreign-owned companies to donate, was consistent with the Constitution.

The judgment runs to 232 pages in total: 158 pages by CJI Chandrachud and 74 pages by Justice Khanna.

If you want to understand how neutral citations like 2024 INSC 113 work and how to locate the official text, the post on e-SCR and neutral citations explains the system in detail.

The Article 19(1)(a) right to information reasoning

This is the heart of the judgment, and it is worth following the chain of reasoning carefully.

Step one: what Article 19(1)(a) protects. The freedom of speech and expression in Article 19(1)(a) has long been held to include the right to receive information. The Supreme Court affirmed this in a series of cases, and the 2024 judgment builds on that foundation.

Step two: who holds the right. The Court held that voters possess a right to information about political funding as part of their right to make an informed electoral choice. The reasoning draws on two earlier Constitution Bench decisions. In Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms (2002), the Court had held that voters have a right to know the criminal antecedents, assets, and educational qualifications of candidates. In PUCL v. Union of India (2003), this was affirmed and extended. The 2024 judgment takes the next step: if voters have a right to know about individual candidates, they have a corresponding right to know who is funding the political parties those candidates represent.

“Information about funding to a political party is essential for a voter to exercise their freedom to vote in an effective manner.”

Step three: why funding information matters for voting. The Court’s reasoning here is grounded in political economy. Political parties in India are not merely election machines; they are the dominant actors in governance. They control what legislation is introduced, what policies are pursued, and how executive power is exercised. If a corporation donates large sums anonymously to a ruling party, and that party then enacts favourable regulatory or contractual arrangements, a voter has no way to connect those dots. The anonymity that the scheme provided to donors was, on this analysis, a curtailment of the voter’s ability to assess the alignment between financial interests and political outcomes.

“The correlation between policy making and financial contributions to political parties is essential information that voters need to assess the nexus between money and policy.”

Step four: is this right infringed by the scheme? Yes, the Court held. The scheme’s architecture was designed to prevent precisely the disclosure that voters need. The exemption from contribution reports, the removal of the shareholder disclosure requirement, and the bearer instrument format all combined to make it impossible for the public to know who gave what to whom.

The government’s argument that donor privacy was a legitimate countervailing interest was not dismissed outright. The Court accepted that political affiliation is a matter that can attract privacy protection, and that donors to minority or opposition parties might face retaliation. The question was whether the claimed privacy interest justified the complete suppression of funding information, or whether a less restrictive alternative existed. That question was answered through the proportionality framework.

The proportionality test: four stages, three failures

The Court applied the four-stage proportionality standard laid down in Modern Dental College and Research Centre v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2016) 7 SCC 353. The four stages are:

  1. Legitimate goal: does the restriction serve a purpose that the Constitution permits?
  2. Rational nexus: is the measure actually connected to achieving that goal?
  3. Necessity: is the measure the least restrictive means available?
  4. Balancing: do the benefits outweigh the costs to the right?

The government put forward two justifications: curbing black money in politics, and protecting donor privacy.

Testing the “curbing black money” justification

Stage 1: Legitimate goal. The Court was sceptical. Curbing black money is not one of the grounds listed in Article 19(2), which sets out the permissible restrictions on free speech and expression. The freedom under Article 19(1)(a) can only be restricted on the specific grounds in Article 19(2), which include security of the state, public order, decency, morality, defamation, and so on. “Curbing black money” is not on that list. The Court therefore found this goal was not traceable to any permitted ground and thus could not justify restricting Article 19(1)(a).

Stage 2: Rational nexus. The measure failed here too. Cash donations below Rs 2,000 remained completely legal and undisclosed under the scheme. A donor seeking to funnel unaccounted money into politics could still do so through small cash donations. The electoral bond route added a paper trail for one category of donor while leaving other routes open. Non-disclosure within the scheme therefore had no rational connection to eliminating black money.

Stage 3: Necessity. The Court noted that Electoral Trusts, a pre-existing vehicle for corporate political donations, already allowed donors to contribute with a degree of confidentiality while still requiring aggregate disclosure. A donor’s individual contribution to a trust was not publicly matched to a specific party receipt, but the total donations and total disbursements were on the record. The scheme went further than necessary by eliminating even aggregate disclosure.

Because the black money justification failed three of the four stages, the Court did not need to reach the balancing stage for this ground.

Testing the “donor privacy” justification

Stage 1: Legitimate goal. Here the Court accepted the premise. Privacy in political affiliation is a genuine constitutional interest, and the Court acknowledged that a donor to an opposition party in certain political climates could plausibly face consequences.

Stage 2: Rational nexus. The scheme failed. The Court pointed out that the government-owned SBI held full KYC records of every purchaser. This meant the state itself knew who had donated to which party. The privacy the scheme provided was against the public and the ECI, but not against the state. The Court used the phrase “de jure confidentiality” rather than “de facto confidentiality”: the scheme created the appearance of anonymity while giving the government access to information that opposition donors and their parties did not have.

Stage 3: Necessity. The Court returned to the pre-existing Rs 20,000 threshold. Donations below that amount were already exempt from the contribution report requirement. This provided genuine small-donor privacy without suppressing information about large contributors. The scheme’s blanket anonymity, including for the Rs 1 crore denomination, was far beyond what was required to protect genuinely vulnerable donors.

Because the donor privacy justification also failed at stages 2 and 3, the Court did not reach the balancing stage for this ground either.

The overall result: the scheme was unconstitutional because it restricted the voter’s right to information under Article 19(1)(a) without satisfying the proportionality standard applicable to that restriction.

For a fuller discussion of how courts apply proportionality analysis across different types of constitutional rights, the post on Article 226 writ jurisdiction covers the broader framework for constitutional challenges in Indian courts.

Manifest arbitrariness and unlimited corporate donations

Separate from the Article 19(1)(a) analysis, the Court struck down the Companies Act amendment on Article 14 grounds. This part of the judgment has implications beyond election law.

Before the Finance Act 2017, Section 182 of the Companies Act, 2013 capped corporate political donations at 7.5 percent of a company’s average net profits over the preceding three financial years. A company that was loss-making could not donate at all. The cap existed because the law treated political donations by companies with some suspicion: a company’s money belongs to its shareholders, not its management, and unlimited political donations by management could amount to a misuse of shareholder funds for political purposes. The disclosure requirement, that the company had to state party-wise donation amounts in its profit-and-loss account, gave shareholders the information they needed to question those decisions.

After the amendment, both the cap and the disclosure requirement were removed. Any company, including one making losses, could donate any amount to any registered political party, and shareholders would not see the breakdown.

The Court’s Article 14 analysis on this point is worth understanding. The doctrine of manifest arbitrariness, developed from Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017) 9 SCC 1, holds that a law violates Article 14 if it is capricious, irrational, or lacks an adequate determining principle. The Court applied this to the corporate donation amendment in three ways:

First, the law treated individual and corporate donors identically after the amendment, even though they have fundamentally different relationships to political funding. An individual donating personal income is making a personal political expression. A company donating retained earnings is using money that belongs partly to shareholders who may hold entirely different political views. Treating these situations as equivalent was irrational.

Second, permitting loss-making companies to donate unlimited amounts was specifically problematic. A company in financial distress that chooses to make large political donations raises obvious questions about the quid pro quo involved. The pre-amendment cap prevented this by tying the donation ceiling to demonstrated financial health.

Third, the removal of shareholder disclosure broke the internal accountability mechanism that had existed for corporate political spending. Shareholders lost the ability to make informed decisions about their investment partly on the basis of management’s political expenditure choices.

“Unlimited contribution by companies to political parties is antithetical to free and fair elections” because it violates the “one person, one vote” principle.

The Court’s analysis on shareholder rights also has an Article 19(1)(a) dimension: shareholders, like voters, have a right to information about decisions that affect them. The amendment that removed party-wise disclosure in profit-and-loss accounts curtailed that right without justification.

The two judgments: CJI Chandrachud and Justice Khanna

The unanimity of the outcome should not obscure the fact that there are two distinct opinions in the record, and they reason differently.

CJI Chandrachud’s majority judgment (158 pages) is the primary text. It covers the full proportionality analysis, the Article 14 manifest arbitrariness holding on corporate donations, the directions to SBI and ECI, and the reading down or invalidation of each specific statutory provision. It is the opinion that will be cited in most subsequent cases.

Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s concurring opinion (74 pages) agrees with all the conclusions but develops an independent line of reasoning. Justice Khanna emphasised that for a restriction on fundamental rights to be constitutionally permissible, it must not only be authorised by law but must also be “necessary in a democratic society” for a legitimate aim, and the extent of the interference must be proportionate to that aim. His framing draws more explicitly on the international law tradition of proportionality and necessity in rights adjudication. He concurred that the scheme satisfied none of these requirements.

The existence of a separate concurrence matters for future cases. When a lawyer cites 2024 INSC 113 for the proportionality proposition, they should specify whether they are relying on CJI Chandrachud’s formulation or Justice Khanna’s. The two are compatible, but they emphasise different aspects of the standard.

To understand how to read and brief a judgment of this kind (especially one with a majority opinion and a concurrence), see the post on how to read an Indian judgment.

Directions, SBI’s resistance, and the disclosure timeline

The February 15 judgment was not self-executing. The Court issued specific directions and had to enforce them actively.

The original directions were:

  1. The Electoral Bond Scheme stood struck down and the SBI was to stop issuing bonds immediately.
  2. SBI was to submit, within three weeks (by 6 March 2024), complete details of every bond purchased from 12 April 2019 onwards, including the date of purchase, the name of the purchaser, and the denomination.
  3. SBI was also to submit details of every bond redeemed by a political party, including the party’s name, the encashment date, and the denomination.
  4. The ECI was to publish this information on its official website within one week of receiving it from SBI (by approximately 13 March 2024).
  5. Any bonds still within their fifteen-day validity window and not yet redeemed were to be returned to SBI and refunded to the purchasers.

SBI’s extension plea was filed on 4 March 2024, asking for an extension of the disclosure deadline until 30 June 2024, essentially until after the 2024 general elections had concluded. The court rejected this without ambiguity. On 11 March 2024, the bench dismissed the application and warned SBI that continued non-compliance would be treated as willful disobedience of the judgment. The Court directed complete disclosure by 12 March 2024, with the ECI to publish by 15 March 2024.

The subsequent proceedings were contentious. On 15 March, the Court noted that SBI’s initial submission was incomplete, particularly the alphanumeric codes on the bonds that would allow individual purchasers to be matched with individual parties. The Court ordered complete disclosure including these identifiers by 21 March 2024. SBI filed a compliance affidavit on that date.

The ADR had also filed a contempt petition on 6 March 2024, which the Court kept alive through the compliance proceedings as a mechanism to ensure that the directions were followed fully.

What the ECI data showed

When the ECI published the bond data in March 2024, it ran to thousands of entries and became the basis for extensive investigative journalism. The verified figures from the ECI disclosures and SBI records are as follows:

Total electoral bonds sold since the scheme’s inception in March 2018: approximately Rs 16,518 crore.

Of the bonds sold from 12 April 2019 (the date from which the Court directed disclosure) to January 2024: approximately Rs 12,155 crore was encashed by political parties.

Party-wise receipts from the ECI data (April 2019 to January 2024):

PartyAmount encashed (approx.)
Bharatiya Janata PartyRs 6,060 crore
All India Trinamool CongressRs 1,610 crore
Indian National CongressRs 1,334 crore
Biju Janata DalRs 944 crore
YSR Congress PartyRs 442 crore
Othersbalance of total

The BJP received more from electoral bonds than the next six parties combined, according to reporting by Business Standard based on the ECI data.

The data also revealed patterns that had not been visible while the scheme was in operation. Several companies that had donated large amounts had subsequently received government contracts or regulatory approvals, prompting investigative reporting by outlets including The Reporters’ Collective. These correlations cannot by themselves establish a quid pro quo, but they are precisely the kind of information the Court held voters had a constitutional right to assess.

Before and after the judgment: a comparison

The judgment changed the legal position across several dimensions simultaneously. The table below summarises the key before-and-after contrasts.

DimensionBefore 15 February 2024After 15 February 2024
Electoral bond issuanceSBI issued bonds in quarterly windows✗ Stopped immediately by court direction
Donor identity (public)✗ Not disclosed✓ Disclosed to ECI, published online
Donor identity (ECI)✗ Not disclosed✓ Disclosed via SBI submission
Corporate donation cap✗ Removed (unlimited donations permitted)✓ Section 182 cap-removal amendment struck down
Shareholder disclosure✗ Party-wise amounts need not be disclosed✓ Amendment struck down; pre-2017 position restored
Contribution reports (RPA s.29C)✗ Bond receipts exempt from reporting✓ Exemption struck down
Income tax records (ITA s.13A)✗ Bond contributions need not be recorded✓ Exemption struck down
Loss-making company donations✗ Permitted without ceiling✓ Struck down as manifestly arbitrary
Review petitionN/A✗ Filed April 2024, dismissed October 2024

Why this judgment matters for constitutional jurisprudence

The electoral bonds case will be cited in future litigation on at least three distinct grounds.

First, the extension of Article 19(1)(a) to political funding. The right to information under Article 19(1)(a) had previously been applied to candidates (criminal records, assets), government decisions (through RTI jurisprudence), and media access. The 2024 judgment extends it clearly to the funding of political parties. This is a significant doctrinal move: it means that any future scheme involving political donations that restricts public access to information about those donations will face a high constitutional threshold. Legislators cannot simply assert donor privacy as a justification and expect it to survive.

Second, the four-stage proportionality test as the standard for Article 19 cases. The judgment applies Modern Dental College’s four-stage test cleanly and fully, working through each stage for each of the government’s two stated justifications. This provides a clear template for how courts should assess rights limitations under Article 19, and it will be the leading case on that methodology for the foreseeable future.

Third, manifest arbitrariness under Article 14 applied to corporate political spending. The Shayara Bano doctrine on manifest arbitrariness gets a specific application here to corporate governance. The judgment’s analysis of why unlimited corporate donations are irrational (the shareholder accountability argument, the loss-making company problem, the conflation of individual and corporate political agency) gives future challengers a framework for attacking similar deregulatory measures.

Fourth, the use of structural constitutional principles. The judgment references the “one person, one vote” principle as a constitutional value that exists alongside the specific enumerated rights. The concern that unlimited corporate funding creates structural inequality in democracy (some voters effectively having more political influence because of their economic position) is a constitutional argument that will recur in electoral and campaign finance litigation.

For research purposes, 2024 INSC 113 should now appear in any citator search for Article 19(1)(a), Article 14 manifest arbitrariness, proportionality, and political equality cases. The post on checking good law in India explains how to verify whether cases citing this judgment have affirmed or distinguished it.

The review petition and its dismissal

A review petition was filed in April 2024 by Advocate Mathews Nedumpara, seeking reconsideration of the February 15 judgment. The Supreme Court dismissed it on 5 October 2024 in a brief order by a five-judge bench led by CJI Chandrachud.

The dismissal order stated: “Having perused the review petitions, there is no error apparent on the face of the record. No case for review under Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013. The review petitions are, therefore, dismissed.”

The standard for a review under Order XLVII Rule 1 is narrow: the petitioner must show an error apparent on the face of the record, or discovery of new and important evidence, or any other sufficient reason. The Court found none of those conditions were satisfied.

No curative petition has been filed in the public record as of the time this post was written.

The dismissal of the review petition makes 2024 INSC 113 final. It is good law. The post on AI legal research in India discusses how to verify the current status of a precedent and avoid the trap of citing a judgment that has been overruled or distinguished.

Frequently asked questions

What is the neutral citation for the electoral bonds judgment?

The neutral citation is 2024 INSC 113. The judgment was delivered on 15 February 2024. The full text is available on the Supreme Court’s official website at sci.gov.in and through Indian Kanoon. The SCC citation is (2024) 2 SCR 420.

Who were the petitioners in the case?

The main petitioners were Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Common Cause, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). ADR filed its petition in September 2017, shortly after the Finance Act 2017 amendments were passed. CPI(M) filed its own petition in January 2018 and is the only registered political party to have challenged the scheme.

What was the Electoral Bonds Scheme and how did it work?

The scheme allowed buyers to purchase bearer instruments called electoral bonds from SBI during quarterly sale windows. Bonds came in denominations from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1 crore. The buyer’s identity was recorded by SBI but not disclosed to the ECI, the recipient party, or the public. Registered parties with at least one percent of votes in recent elections could redeem the bonds within fifteen days of purchase. The scheme ran from January 2018 to February 2024, when the Supreme Court struck it down.

Why did the Court say the scheme violated Article 19(1)(a)?

Article 19(1)(a) protects freedom of speech and expression, which the Court has long held includes the right to receive information. The Court extended this to include voters’ right to know who funds political parties. Political parties control governance, so funding information is essential for voters to assess whose interests a party represents. The scheme’s anonymity prevented voters from accessing this information, infringing the right without surviving proportionality review.

What is the proportionality test, and how did the scheme fail it?

The Court applied the four-stage test from Modern Dental College v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2016): (1) legitimate goal, (2) rational nexus between the measure and the goal, (3) necessity (least restrictive means), and (4) proportionate balancing. The scheme’s two stated goals were curbing black money and protecting donor privacy. The black money goal failed at stage 1 (not a permitted ground under Article 19(2)) and stages 2 and 3. The donor privacy goal failed at stages 2 and 3. The Court did not need to reach stage 4 for either ground.

What did the Court do about corporate donations under the Companies Act?

Section 182 of the Companies Act, 2013 was amended by the Finance Act 2017 to remove the 7.5 percent cap on corporate political donations and to remove the requirement that companies disclose party-wise donation amounts to shareholders. The Court struck down this amendment under Article 14 as manifestly arbitrary. It found that permitting unlimited donations by loss-making companies and removing shareholder disclosure were both irrational, treating the amendment as violating the principle that laws must have a rational basis.

Was the judgment unanimous?

Yes. All five judges agreed that the scheme was unconstitutional and agreed on the directions. CJI D.Y. Chandrachud wrote a 158-page majority judgment. Justice Sanjiv Khanna wrote a separate 74-page concurring opinion reaching the same conclusions through somewhat different reasoning. Justices B.R. Gavai, J.B. Pardiwala, and Manoj Misra joined the majority.

What directions did the Court give?

The Court directed: (1) SBI to stop issuing bonds immediately; (2) SBI to submit details of all bonds purchased from 12 April 2019 onwards to the ECI within three weeks; (3) SBI to submit party-wise redemption details; (4) the ECI to publish the information on its website within one week; and (5) unredeemed bonds within their fifteen-day validity to be returned and refunded to purchasers.

Why did SBI seek an extension, and what happened?

SBI applied on 4 March 2024 for an extension of the disclosure deadline to 30 June 2024, which would have pushed the disclosure past the 2024 general elections. The Court dismissed the application on 11 March 2024 and warned SBI of contempt proceedings if it did not comply. The Court directed full disclosure including alphanumeric identifiers by 21 March 2024. SBI filed a compliance affidavit by that date.

What did the ECI data reveal after disclosure?

The disclosed data showed that approximately Rs 16,518 crore in electoral bonds was sold between March 2018 and January 2024. Of the amount sold from April 2019 onwards, the BJP encashed approximately Rs 6,060 crore, making it by far the largest beneficiary. The AITC received approximately Rs 1,610 crore, the INC approximately Rs 1,334 crore, and the BJD approximately Rs 944 crore. Investigative reporting identified potential correlations between large donors and subsequent government decisions, precisely the kind of analysis the Court said voters had a right to perform.

Was there a Finance Act 2016 amendment also challenged?

Yes. The Finance Act 2016 amended the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act to allow foreign companies with majority Indian shareholding to donate to political parties. This was one of the grounds raised by the petitioners. The 2024 judgment’s primary analysis focused on the 2017 amendments, but the 2016 FCRA amendment was also part of the statutory challenge.

What is the difference between the pre-existing Electoral Trusts and electoral bonds?

Electoral Trusts were a pre-existing vehicle through which companies could donate to political parties with some degree of confidentiality. A donor’s specific contribution to a trust was not individually matched to a specific party, but total donations received and disbursed by the trust were disclosed. The Court noted that Electoral Trusts already balanced donor confidentiality against public disclosure, and that the electoral bond scheme went further than necessary by eliminating even aggregate disclosure requirements. This comparison was relevant to the necessity stage of the proportionality test.

Did the judgment say anything about the right to vote?

The judgment closely connected the right to information with the right to vote under Article 19(1)(a), read with the constitutional structure of free and fair elections. The Court held that the franchise is effective only if the voter can make an informed choice, and that information about political funding is essential to that choice. The reasoning builds on the earlier cases establishing that voters have a right to know candidates’ criminal and financial backgrounds.

What statutory provisions were struck down?

The Court struck down: Section 137 of the Finance Act 2017 (which amended Section 29C of the RPA to exempt bond receipts from contribution reports); Section 11 of the Finance Act 2017 (which amended Section 13A of the Income Tax Act to exempt bond contributions from record-keeping requirements); and Section 154 of the Finance Act 2017 (which amended Section 182 of the Companies Act to remove the cap and shareholder disclosure requirement). Section 135 of the Finance Act 2017 (amending Section 31 of the RBI Act) was also struck down, removing the authorisation for SBI to issue electoral bonds.

What happens to political funding now that the scheme is gone?

Registered political parties can still receive donations through other channels: cheques or digital transfers (disclosed above the Rs 20,000 threshold), Electoral Trusts, and small cash donations below Rs 2,000 per person per year. The pre-amendment position under the Companies Act applies, meaning corporate donations are again capped at 7.5 percent of average net profits and must be disclosed party-wise in company accounts. The RPA contribution report requirement also applies, so large donors must be reported.

What was the review petition outcome?

The review petition filed in April 2024 by Advocate Mathews Nedumpara was dismissed on 5 October 2024 by a five-judge bench led by CJI Chandrachud. The Court found no error apparent on the face of the record and no grounds for review under Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013. The judgment is therefore final.

Does the judgment affect the 2024 general elections?

The bonds already purchased before the judgment were directed to be redeemed or refunded. The data disclosed by SBI and published by ECI in March 2024 covers the period up to January 2024, so information about donations made before the judgment was available to the public ahead of the April-May 2024 general elections, though the analysis of that data was still being conducted as voting began.

How does this judgment relate to the right to information under the RTI Act?

The judgment does not rest on the RTI Act, 2005. Its foundation is the constitutional right under Article 19(1)(a), not the statutory right to information. This distinction matters: constitutional rights operate at a higher level and can be used to challenge legislation itself, which is what the Court did here. An RTI request could not have compelled disclosure of electoral bond data because the scheme’s statutory architecture specifically exempted this information. The constitutional route was necessary precisely because the RTI Act route was blocked by the amendments.

What is the significance of the “one person, one vote” principle cited in the judgment?

The Court invoked “one person, one vote” to explain why unlimited corporate donations are structurally problematic in a democracy. If one corporation can channel hundreds of crores to a political party, its effective influence over governance is disproportionate to what its employees or shareholders would have through their individual votes. The principle is not a separate fundamental right in the Indian Constitution in the way electoral rights are codified elsewhere, but the Court used it as an underlying constitutional value that legislative choices in this space must respect.

Is 2024 INSC 113 still good law?

Yes. The review petition was dismissed in October 2024. The judgment has not been distinguished or overruled. It is a five-judge Constitution Bench decision and can only be reconsidered by a bench of equal or larger size.

How to research this judgment further

The 232-page judgment in 2024 INSC 113 is available at no cost from the Supreme Court’s official portal and from Indian Kanoon. The full PDF is at api.sci.gov.in. The Supreme Court Observer’s case page has a well-maintained background document and links to individual hearing reports and the full timeline. ADR’s analysis from the petitioner’s perspective is a useful secondary source. The ECI’s disclosure page has the underlying bond data.

If you want to understand how the judgment has been cited since February 2024, or whether any subsequent cases have applied or distinguished the proportionality analysis, you can research Indian case law with Niyam, which searches across 72,000+ Indian judgments and surfaces the relevant passages with citations. Your queries stay private, never sold or used to train public models. Ask at app.niyam.ai or write to [email protected].