Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

@article{196294,
        author = {Jayesh vishnu rengade and Jayesh vishnu rengade},
        title = {DARK FINANCE AND DEMOCRATIC DECAY: A JUDICIAL PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL BLACK MONEY IN INDIA},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2531-2541},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=196294},
        abstract = {The hidden money moving through electoral veins is not a peripheral irritant in Indian democracy — it sits at the core of how power is actually won, held, and deployed. When wealthy corporate houses, organised crime figures, or foreign-linked investors bankroll a party’s rise to office without any public record of that transaction, something more serious than a regulatory violation has occurred. The voters who cast ballots on polling day are exercising a formal right while lacking the material knowledge that genuine electoral choice requires. Informed consent — which is what democratic participation ought to mean — is hollowed out well before the ballot is printed.
This research takes the Indian Supreme Court’s decades-long engagement with these questions as its central subject. Using data from regulatory bodies including the Election Commission, the Enforcement Directorate and the Income Tax Department, supplemented by civil society monitoring from the Association for Democratic Reforms and investigative journalism produced since 2014, the paper traces a recurring institutional drama: a court that reaches for constitutional principle and a legislature that reaches, just as quickly, for the nearest workaround. The ruling in February 2024 striking down the Electoral Bond Scheme represents the most recent and most significant chapter of that drama, though hardly the concluding one.
The argument advanced here is that judicial intervention, however skilful, is structurally insufficient to the problem at hand. Transparency in electoral finance will not become durable until it is grounded in public funding mechanisms, a near-universal disclosure obligation, and an enforcement authority that owes nothing of its institutional existence to the parties it is supposed to regulate. India has none of those things today. Building them is a political challenge, not a legal one, and the courts cannot do it alone.},
        keywords = {Political black money, dark finance, Electoral Bond Scheme, democratic decay, PMLA 2002, Association for Democratic Reforms, judicial review, constitutional democracy, political finance, illicit financial flows.},
        month = {April},
        }