Decoding India's electoral practices

Jujitsu is a method of fighting that makes use of few or no weapons and employs paralysing blows to subdue a usually armed opponent, leveraging the opponent's weight.

- ADITI PHADNIS

A reporter is a bit like a jujitsu fighter, a puny warrior battling to tell the real story against the might of the state.

Poonam Agarwal's account of how she finessed the system to lay bare the truth behind the supposedly politics-agnostic electoral bonds is an inspiring example of how as a reporter she used entirely legal tools available to her to expose the nexus between corporate funding, elections, and political parties. For this, she says, she came to be known in many quarters as the "Bond Girl".

The electoral bonds scheme was meant to delink political donations and political parties by keeping the identity of the donors anonymous. In fact, it was just the opposite: With no "visible" serial number, corporate houses could buy electoral bonds sold by State Bank of India (SBI) and donate them to any party of their choice. Except that all bonds had a unique hidden alphanumeric number.

So, all corporate houses had to do was buy the bonds that could then be redeemed by the political party and presumably, quietly let the party know how much their support was worth, by slipping them the alphanumeric number. A move to provide transparency to funding elections thus became a system of fostering cronyism.