It’s happening again. The Supreme Court has its eyes on political money. This time, it’s not the bonds. It’s the cash. The small stuff that lets big money stay anonymous.
The Court, Justices Nath and Mehta’s bench, they didn’t rule yet. But they issued notice. They agreed to examine the plea.
The target? It’s a section in the Income Tax Act—Section $13A(d)$. It’s messy. That little clause says, look, political parties can take cash donations up to ₹2,000. And they get a tax break for it. The thing is, they don’t have to name the donor.
Let’s be real. That’s the whole scam.
X is the rule: You can donate ₹2,000 cash. Anonymous.
And then Y follows: A well-endowed contributor—rich guy, big firm—can split a massive donation into thousands of those tiny ₹2,000 chunks. Multiple people carry the bags. It’s laundered clean by simple arithmetic. It’s a loophole.
The petitioner, Khem Singh Bhati, he’s not holding back. He’s saying: Transparency? Or nothing. Every single rupee, no matter how small, needs to be digital, needs to be declared. Name, address, everything. Voters have the right to know. That’s the Article 19(1)(a) argument—it’s about the right to information.
The Paperwork Mess
This whole thing is bigger than just ₹2,000. It’s about accountability.
The petition slams the Form 24A reports—the mandatory annual disclosures. They are incomplete. They are delayed. The BJP, the Congress, the CPI(M)—they all filed their reports weeks late. Days and days overdue.
Addresses missing.
PAN numbers missing.
Big money shows up as “fees and subscriptions” with no name attached. Who pays those “fees?” No idea.
The ECI, the Union government, all the major parties (13 of them, from BJP to Congress to AAP) are now named respondents. They have to answer. The petitioner even wants the ECI to demand all that incomplete money be deposited somewhere. And he wants the ECI to suspend the symbols of parties that keep messing up their filings.
It’s a huge case. It says the system is fundamentally broken. The Court noticed. X happened on Monday. And then a demand for total financial transparency followed. We’ll wait two or three weeks for the next act. It’s ongoing.
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