
The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a batch of petitions seeking a court-monitored SIT probe into alleged quid pro quo between companies and political parties in the purchase of electoral bonds.
The top court said, “It will be both premature and inappropriate for the court to do so.”
The apex court also turned down the pleas to direct the authorities to recover the donations received by political parties through electoral bonds and to re-open their income tax assessments. The top court said that these remedies pertain to the exercise of statutory functions by authorities under the Income Tax Act. For the apex court to issue any such directions at this stage would mean amount to a conclusive opinion on disputed facts, Live Law reported.
The bench of CJI DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra dealt with four petitions, one filed jointly by NGOs Common Cause and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL), three others by Dr.Khem Singh Bhatti, Sudip Narayan Tamankar and Jai Prakash Sharma, according to Live Law.
This comes five months after the Supreme Court struck down the Narendra Modi government’s 2018 electoral bonds scheme of anonymous political funding.
“The information about funding to a political party is essential for a voter to exercise their freedom to vote in an effective manner”, said a five-judge Constitution bench, headed by the Chief Justice of India.