Union finance minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday sought suggestions from political parties to further strengthen the cleansing of political funding.
The finance minister indicated thatthe government has no intention to take back its decision on electoral bonds taken last week to make political funding and hassle free. The bonds were being pitched as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties.
In a Facebook post, the Union finance minister said the electoral bonds mechanism is a substantial improvement in transparency over the conventional practice of funding. In the earlier system, poltical parties used to take donations as well as undertake expenditures in cash. The sources used to be anonymous or pseudonymous.

“It is a wholly non-transparent system. Most political groups seem fairly satisfied with the present arrangement and would not mind this status-quo to continue… The effort, therefore, is to run down any alternative system which is devised to cleanse up the political funding mechanism,” the finance minister said.

In the earlier system, the quantum of money was never disclosed and the system ensures unclean money coming from unidentifiable sources, the minister said.

The finance minister said the choice has now to be consciously made between the existing system of substantial cash donations involving unclean money and other transparent options like cheque, online transactions or electoral bonds.

“While all three methods involve clean money, the first two are totally transparent and the electoral bonds scheme is a substantial improvement in transparency over the present system of no-transparency,” he said.

“The government is willing to consider all suggestions to further strengthen the cleansing of political funding in India. It has to be borne in mind that impractical suggestions will not improve the cash denominated system. They would only consolidate it,” Jaitley wrote.

He said India, despite being the largest democracy in the world, has not been able to evolve a transparent political funding system in the last seven decades.

“The round the year functioning of the political parties involves a large expenditure… These expenditures run into hundreds of crores. Yet there has not been a transparent funding mechanism of the political system,” he said.