Amidst the sharpening attack on the “civil society” members in the Lokpal Bill drafting committee by the Congress and from certain other quarters for their alleged attempt to “usurp” legislative powers, an NGO on whose initiative the Supreme Court made the disclosure of criminal antecedents of the legislators mandatory has come out with sensational revelation of the criminal history of a large number of MPs and MLAs raising question mark on their competence to legislate “honestly” on the issues directly concerning them.
The most interesting part of the analysis — based on the sworn affidavits of the legislators before the election commission as per the Supreme Court guidelines — by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), was that even the women legislators are not legging behind in taking the law into their hands.
This has come to light with the latest report of the ADR on election results of Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Pudducherry as 18 per cent of the newly elected 72 women MLAs in these states have serious criminal cases pending against them.
However, the figure for male MLAs is very alarming with 244 (32 per cent) of the total of 752 faced criminal cases, including those related to the corruption charges.
The Association of Democratic Reforms’s analysis of the affidavits of Lok Sabha MPs suggested that 150 out 543 law makers in the Lower House were from “criminal background” with 72 of them facing charges of very serious nature under the Indian Penal Code and the other provisions of law, including the Prevention of Corruption Act.
In fact the situation in the Lok Sabha had worsened in the 2009 elections as compared to 2004 polls with the number of MPs with the criminal background going up from 128 to 172, showing a rise of 17 per cent.
The disease had infected all the political parties alike with the major parties, Congress and BJP respectively accounting for 41 and 42 law makers in the Lok Sabha having criminal cases pending, the ADR stated.
ADR stated that the phenomenon has even extended to indirect elections with the current Rajya Sabha having 37 MPs having criminal cases pending either before the probe agencies or in the courts.
“The self sworn affidavits giving details of criminal cases collected for 219 Rajya Sabha MPs from state assembly secretariats, showed that 37 MPs of the Upper House (17 per cent) have declared criminal cases pending against them,” the ADR report said adding “of these 37 MPs, 12 faced serious criminal charges”.
According to ADR’s numerous reports on the election results of different states with regard to the elected legislators’ criminal antecedents, the situation was all the more same in all the state Assemblies with MLAs ranging between 25 to 30 per cent coming from “criminal background” and in some states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra have even a higher percentage of legislators facing serious criminal charges.