By lifting the veil of secrecy from a now-banned election funding mechanism, India’s Supreme Court has shown that the rot in the country’s opaque political donations may be as wide as it is deep.

The disclosure by the nation’s election commission — a day in advance of the judges’ Friday deadline — doesn’t provide all the answers, though it indeed throws up troubling questions about the exact nature of the relationship between capital and politics. And it does so just before nearly one billion voters in the world’s biggest democracy start choosing their next government.