Electoral Bonds Are Legitimate, Transparent, Says Arun Jaitley

TIL Desk/National/New Delhi/ Terming electoral bonds a legitimate and transparent method of political funding, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday said it masks the link between the party and the donor in the same way the electoral trusts brought by the UPA did.

NGOs have tendency to either exaggerate or misrepresent and were spreading misinformation about the bonds, he said in a Facebook post. “Those dealing with elections and electoral reforms have come out with two categories of reports. The first one says that since in its balance sheet, the BJP declares much larger income, it should be assumed that it gets more donations than other parties.

“The second report says that BJP gets the lion’s share of the electoral bonds. Both display a lack of understanding of how parties function,” he said. Mr. Jaitley said the BJP preferred legitimate methods like crowd sourcing, cheque and electoral bonds over “the old obsolete style” of collecting only black money by some parties.