When SBI sold an electoral bond to an entity, it ensured that the KYC (Know Your Customer) norms were fulfilled to its format. That is all the details, name, company name, PAN Number, Address, Contact Number, etc. were known to SBI.
Not only that all the bonds were sold through cheques deposited into SBI and these cheques came from other banks, which too had the KYC of the issuer of the cheque. Therefore there is no escape for anyone from this data being captured.
Now, after receiving this Cheque, SBI issued a bond that was bearer in nature. That means the person holding the bond was the owner of the bond, just like a 500 rupee note that is yours when you hold it and belongs to someone else when you give it to them.
SBI would record the secret number of the bond against any such issue. This was required to prevent forgery and reconcile the sold bonds with redeemed bonds.
So, in SBI records, the KYC of the bond purchaser would exist along with the secret number of the bond.
Now, once the bond is deposited by a political party, SBI would require to first authenticate whether it is the bond that it had issued in the first place and when authenticated, it would credit the account of the political party held by itself with the amount mentioned on the bond.
That would be the end of transaction as far as SBI is concerned. A bond issued by it has been redeemed by it.
SBI would automatically record the secret number against the redemption records of the political party.
Even if SBI held these two records physically, it would still have all the redeemed bond with serial numbers / secret numbers available with it.
In total 22717 bonds have been issued. If it took 2 minutes to take out a redeemed bond and read its secret number, it would take 22,717 x 2 minutes to read the entire stack. Which works out to 31 days. That is assuming just one person is doing the work. If 20 people were assigned to the job then it would take just under 2 days to record all the numbers and just 1 day if 40 people were assigned to the job. And SBI has no shortage of manpower
Now that SBI has been told to produce all the details, all the secret numbers will become known and it will become known who gave money to whom and in turn it would be an open session for everyone to find out why someone gave money to some political party. Whether such action was to prevent any further ED/CBI/Income Tax investigation or prosecution or was it for contracts awarded.
That is why FICCI, Assocham and other bodies are trying to prevent the direct correlation of data.
But SC will have none of that.
On 21st March, the truth will be known. A pandora’s box is going to be thrown open.
BJP that came into power using Social Media is perhaps going to die because of Social Media.