The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh may be on the path to electing its least crime-tainted assembly in years, although analysts say it is too early to celebrate.
The percentage of candidates facing criminal charges in the initial phases of elections to the state assembly has fallen significantly from five years ago. The election is being held in seven stages from February 11 until March 8 to cope with the state’s population of more than 200 million.
Of the 2,386 candidates contesting the first three phases of the election, just over 16 per cent were facing criminal investigations, according to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a New Delhi-based non-profit organisation.
That percentage is significantly lower than in the last Uttar Pradesh elections in 2012, when 35 per cent of 2,195 candidates contesting the polls had criminal cases registered against them, according to ADR’s survey of affidavits and other public records.
Nearly half of the candidates elected in 2012 – 189 out of 403 – were facing criminal investigations, up from 140 in 2007.
However, Anil Verma, ADR’s national coordinator, said that a correct picture of this year’s election would emerge only once the election was completed.
Over the past few years, the pressure on political parties to stop fielding candidates facing criminal investigations has increased, said Mr Verma.
“Civil society organisations have always been at it, but now the media is also paying this a lot of attention,” he said.
Across India, political parties have, to varying degrees, allowed people embroiled in criminal charges to represent them. “These also tend to be people with money, which they can spend on their own election campaign, so they are more likely to win,” Mr Verma said.
With campaign costs rising, the election commission raised its limit on expenditure for the 2014 parliamentary election from 4 million rupees (Dh220,000) per candidate to 7 million rupees. But a study of spending during the 2014 election by the New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies found that candidates spent between 30 billion and 40 billion rupees to buy votes.
Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, found that such candidates’ potential to win goes beyond their pocketbooks.
"In contexts where the rule of law is weakly enforced and social divisions are rampant, a candidate's criminal reputation could be perceived as an asset," Mr Vaishnav wrote in his new book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.
“In the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics … voters might just value politicians who are willing to engage in extralegal tactics to protect the status of their community,” Mr Vaishnav noted. “A candidate’s criminality can also help to weaken or counterbalance political opposition from rival groups through coercion and intimidation.”
ADR’s researchers are often told by political parties that criminal cases foisted against politicians are largely politically motivated, Mr Verma said.
“We don’t agree. Some of them have long histories of criminal cases and past convictions, running into three or four A4 sheets even.”
Since the last Uttar Pradesh election, a change in the law has helped curb the involvement of convicted criminals in politics.
In 2013, the supreme court ruled that any legislator convicted of a crime that carries a minimum of two years’ imprisonment is automatically disqualified from serving in parliament or a state assembly and barred from seeking elected office for a further six years after serving their sentence.
Before this ruling, convicted politicians could appeal against their convictions, confident that they could continue serving their legislative terms while their cases languished for years in backlogged courts.
Despite the findings over the first three phases of the Uttar Pradesh election, Mr Verma is not hopeful that the reduction in the proportion of candidates with criminal cases represents a permanent trend.
“I don’t see an overall decrease, across the country,” he said. “The political parties aren’t taking this seriously enough, and by voting for such candidates, the population also isn’t giving the right signals.”
Indeed, an indicator of the opposite – the increasing criminalisation of politics – came during the Kerala state elections last year, when 62 per cent of elected legislators were facing criminal investigations. This was, according to ADR’s research, the highest such proportion in any Indian state assembly.
Dr Verma said the supreme court’s 2013 ruling needed to be strengthened with more reforms in electoral laws.
“Even in cases where criminal charges are pending or being investigated, if the case is such where punishment would entail five years or more in prison, such candidates should not be permitted to contest elections at all,” he said.
To implement such a reform will require a conjunction of judicial and political will, but this was not likely, Mr Verma said. “The political parties simply don’t want this to happen.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
