The electoral bond scheme notified in 2018 and scrapped by the Supreme Court last month was meant to fund political parties through bearer bonds. Since these bonds were valid only for 15 days from the date of issue, it is natural to expect that most such donations would go to political parties relevant in a particular election cycle. However, data on electoral bonds released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on March 14 suggests that this is not always the case.

An HT analysis of the electoral bonds redeemed by political parties between April 12, 2019 and January 24, 2024 — this is the period of which ECI has released data for individual bonds — shows that donations to political parties are not necessarily tied to election cycles where a party is relevant. To be sure, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is relevant in most elections, was the biggest recipient of funds in all election cycles analysed here except during the Bihar 2020 election cycle, when it was the fourth biggest recipient.

How was an electoral bond tied to an election cycle? Officially, it was only marginally related to election cycles. According to the modalities of the scheme notified in 2018, special election windows for bond sales could only be opened for an additional 30 days in Lok Sabha election years, apart from their regular 10-day cycles in January, April, July, and October of every year. In November 2022, the Union government also allowed itself the power to notify bond sale windows for an additional 15 days in a year of assembly elections.

Since the official classification put most bond sales as usual, HT classified sale windows based on a different criterion. All dates after the month of a state election result were classified as belonging to the next election cycle. For example, the July and October 2019 windows of bond sales were classified as part of the 2019 Haryana and Maharashtra election cycle, results for which were announced on October 24, 2019. The next cycle of bond purchase and redemption only started in January 2020, and was classified as part of the 2020 Delhi election cycle.

This classification shows that bonds did not always flow to the main contestants of an upcoming election. One example of this were the donations made to the Trinamool Congress (TMC). The party was the second biggest recipient of funds through electoral bonds in five of the 11 election cycles during the period described above, and the third biggest recipient in another three election cycles. Among the five election cycles where the TMC was the second-biggest recipient were the 2019 elections in Haryana and Maharashtra and the 2020 elections in Delhi. The TMC did not contest any of these elections. To be sure, the TMC did contest the Jharkhand state elections, which took place in the months of November and December in 2019, but was not a serious contender in the state. In the 26 of 81 assembly constituencies (ACs) the TMC contested in Jharkhand, it polled a vote share of only 0.9% and won no seats.

In contrast to the TMC, the Congress was the second-biggest recipient in only three of the 11 election cycles: the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the two elections cycles last year – the Karnataka elections held in May and the Rajasthan-Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh-Telangana-Mizoram elections held in November and December. It was not even the third biggest recipient in other cycles despite being the second-biggest national party with a much bigger footprint than the TMC.

While the Congress and the TMC are notable because they are also the biggest recipients of funds overall after the BJP, most other parties also received electoral bond funds irrespective of their relevance in a particular election cycle. Odisha’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD), for example, was the third biggest recipient during the 2020 election cycles of Bihar and Delhi; and the second biggest during the election cycle for Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal in 2021.

These statistics, however, do not mean that electoral bonds had no relation to election cycles at all. For example, the Janata Dal (Secular) – which is primarily a Karnataka party – received electoral bond funds during last year’s Karnataka election cycle and in the 2019 Lok Sabha election cycle.