No Place In Politics: Why Do We Keep Electing Criminals?

By M H Ahssan / INN Live

The UPA should heed the SC rather than passing an ordinance to save convicted lawmakers. Sometimes, as a citizen of this country, the only response left is to throw one’s hands up and say to the parties on either end of the political divide — a plague on both your houses.

On 24 September, the Union Cabinet approved an ordinance to effectively allow convicted criminals to remain part of the legislature, despite a Supreme Court order requiring their immediate disqualification. This government has a tin ear for national dialogue. 
Even if you discount polls by advocacy groups like Avaaz that show that some 98 percent of Indians support the Supreme Court order, it doesn’t take a man with his finger on the political pulse and his ear to the ground (preferably at the same time) to recognise that, by and large, we the people agree it is a good thing to keep convicted criminals out of politics.

What does the government have to gain by its likely unpopular ordinance? Well, as thinner and thinner slices of the population are carved up between more and more political parties, petty election-year politicking counts for a lot more than silly, unimportant things like paying attention to what people want. 

Evidence of the kind of politicking and election-year calculations I’m talking about is that every op-ed and analytical column about the ordinance features the names Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rashid Masood.

“But, but,” UPA figures cry, “politicians have a right to have their convictions heard by higher courts and even politicians have the right to be presumed innocent until their guilt is fully established.” If convicted criminals cannot vote, the Supreme Court counters, if they cannot stand for election, how can they be allowed to be part of the legislature?

Certainly, there needs to be further debate about our denial of voting rights not just to prisoners but also to ‘undertrials’ and the presumption of innocence is a powerful, important principle of justice but it’s equally clear that the Supreme Court is the only institution willing to confront the problem of criminals in politics. 

Political parties of whatever stripe, the BJP’s half-hearted condemnation of the ordinance notwithstanding, simply have too much to lose by alienating criminals they endorse and put up as candidates for election.

Let’s say all of us agree something needs to be done about the ‘criminalisation’ of our politics. The figures bear repeating. Nearly a third of our MPs and MLAs have declared that criminal cases have been filed against them. Nearly half of those cases are serious, involving potential jail terms of at least two years. ‘Serious’ charges also include murder, rape, extortion and corruption. So if we all agree that criminals shouldn’t be in politics, why do we continue to elect them?

In a recent talk in New Delhi’s India International Centre, the academic Trilochan Sastry presented an analysis of the records of the 62,487 candidates who have stood for Lok Sabha or Assembly elections since 2004. Most interesting were the numbers presented for the 8,882 winners in these years, up to 2013. 

According to Sastry, a criminal record can actually help your chances to win an election. “While only 12 percent of candidates with a clean record win on average,” he says, “23 percent of candidates with some kind of criminal record win, and more alarmingly, 23 percent of all those with serious criminal charges win.”

A table appended to Sastry’s paper showed the figures for all the seats contested in Assembly, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha elections between 2004 and 2013. The BJP won 30 percent of the seats it contested. Of its winning candidates, 28 percent of those with clean records won, while 40 percent of those with “serious criminal charges” filed against them won. Across the board, parties follow suit. 

Congress actually manages to buck the trend very slightly. It won 39 percent of the seats it contested; 39 percent of candidates with clean records won, while 34 percent of candidates with serious criminal records won. No wonder political parties are so relaxed about fielding candidates accused of and even convicted of committing crimes.

We are represented, it has to be said, by an astonishingly unsavoury bunch. Incidentally, of the 8,882 winning candidates over the past near-decade, less than 8 percent are women and vanishingly few of them have serious criminal records. Maleness, money (58 percent of our Lok Sabha MPs are crorepatis) and a strong stomach for dishonesty appear to be prerequisites for success in Indian politics. Do we get the politicians we deserve? That’s for you to decide.