In an interview to share his immediate response to the State Bank of India’s petition requesting more than three and a half months extra time till June 30 to make public electoral bond details, one of the Supreme Court’s most respected former judges has said “I don’t believe the SBI’s explanation”.
Justice Deepak Gupta also revealed that he was part of a bench which in 2019 had told the SBI to collate and keep the relevant details of the electoral bond scheme i.e. to maintain records and he does not accept that they now need three and a half months extra time (over and above the initial three weeks granted to them) to make the information available to the Election Commission.
At one point in the interview he said the SBI’s position was “absolutely ridiculous”.
Justice Gupta also said “this explanation is not really worth much”.
Referring to the order of April 2019, when he was part of the bench, Justice Gupta said: “Once the Court had directed that you keep this information it was their bounden duty to keep it in such a manner that when a Court asks them to disclose it they should disclose it as early as possible. Not that they take months to disclose it.”
In the interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Justice Deepak Gupta has also said “I think it should take a few hours or a few days at the most to collate all the details” and make the relevant details of the electoral bond scheme available.
In the interview, Justice Gupta said that by the State Bank of India’s own admission it only has 44,434 sets of information. In contrast, he added, they probably handle 44 million each day across all their branches. Why then, he inferred, do they have this problem collating 44,434 sets of information?”
Justice Gupta said that in his opinion the electoral bond details must be made available to the public at least five or six days before the polling starts. He added the Supreme Court has every right to reject the SBI’s petition and set a new deadline by when the information is made available. It seems to follow from his answer that he believes that the information should be available at the latest by the middle of April i.e. when polling is likely to start.
