It is official now. The Electoral Bond (EB) scheme, struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of India, is the single biggest scam witnessed until now in independent India. The mammoth amount of money that was anonymously funnelled into the coffers of political parties from exceptionally tainted corporate groups through this notoriously opaque scheme has also exploded, once and for all, the BJP's tall claims that it is an organisation untouched by corruption. It is now open that the scheme, birthed in 2017 by the “genteel” Union Finance Minister, the late Arun Jaitley, and midwifed by his malleable mandarins, came into being by hastily rubbishing repeated objections from the Election Commission of India (ECI) and Reserve Bank of India (RBI). But for the apex court’s current intervention, the “bondgate” would have choked India’s already limping democracy, legalised a contaminated political sphere, and scarred forever its electoral system, which has endured even while all of our neighbours intermittently relapsed into autocracy.

Even as the murky story of the sleazy iceberg and its slimy villains unfolds, let us honour a few heroes who opposed and exposed the fraud from the beginning. They include a few brave individuals and still fewer institutions like ECI and RBI that have resisted the attempts of the political bosses to undermine them.

Dr. Urjit Patel: The 24th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, who directly conveyed his strong objections about the various aspects of the EB scheme directly to Jaitley. Born in Kenya to a Gujarati migrant business family, Patel (60) was educated at the London School of Economics and the universities of Yale and Cambridge. After serving two years, Patel became the first RBI Governor to resign, citing personal reasons in December 2018. His........

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