Karnataka Assembly Elections 2023: A thumping victory, and some concerns

55% of candidates facing criminal cases won election this time, up from 35% in 2018. It is time to debar criminal elements from contesting polls

It is a record broken after 34 years – the Congress’ victory in the Karnataka election in terms of both the number of seats and the vote share. It is a decisive and sweeping mandate, with a record voter turnout of 72%.

There will be endless analyses of the factors and players who contributed to this thumping victory. Was it a severe case of anti-incumbency? Karnataka has never returned an incumbent back to power since 1985. Was it because of disgust against the corruption captured by the phrase “40% Sarkara”? Was it because of an excessive focus on issues touching religious fault-lines? Was it voter fatigue with hate speech? These are all negative motivator factors.

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What about the positive motivators that led to this victory? Was it the five guarantees that the Congress promised? These were about free power, guaranteed minimum income, free food, and free bus travel, and unemployment insurance. Some of these promises sound like freebies and some like social protection. The latter is needed, and the former is troublesome. All these factors surely mattered to some extent. And the voters, as always, are influenced more by emotive factors than rational, economic or objective factors. This is a feature of all elections in India.

But there is one aspect of the outcome that should worry us all. It is the rise of criminal elements. If anything, it calls for urgent reforms to cleanse the electoral process. The share of winning candidates who have pending criminal cases has jumped sharply -- from 35% in 2018 to 55%. The rising share cuts across political parties. Of these 55% legislators, even if one looks at those with only serious criminal cases, the trend is alarming. That share of winning candidates has gone up from 24% to 32%. The serious cases are those related to murder, assault, kidnap, rape and economic offences. These are non-bailable offences, which attract long-term jail.

Let’s be clear about who we call “criminal elements”. These are not candidates against whom a mere complaint or FIR has been filed with the police. The criminal cases against them are the outcome of a competent magistrate applying his or her judicial mind and then framing charges. Of course, a person is innocent until proven guilty, and only convicted persons are barred from contesting elections, that too if the conviction is not under appeal in a higher court. Pending cases can go on for years and years in the appeal process. Hence the electoral law as it stands has failed to keep criminal elements out of our state legislatures and parliament. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had in his maiden speech in the Rajya Sabha in June 2014 expressed great anguish about this issue. He had said that cleansing the polity of criminal elements would be a top priority and asked the courts to fast-track these particular cases. But his government has passed no new law to disqualify criminal elements.

The issue of disqualifying candidates with criminal backgrounds has been discussed for more than three decades. The 170th report of the 15th Law Commission under Justice Jeevan Reddy in 1999 had recommended reforms to disqualify candidates. The 244th report of the 20th Law Commission under Justice A P Shah had very detailed proposals for disqualifying criminal candidates. This report was submitted in February 2014. Much earlier, in 1993, a committee led by former Home Secretary N N Vohra had submitted a report on the criminalisation of politics. It is thus clear that at least since the early 1990s, the issue of a criminal taint to politics has been of great concern to everyone. And yet the share of those with criminal backgrounds keeps rising. And this is a phenomenon seen in parliament as well as the state legislatures. There is no use saying that the people keep electing those with criminal backgrounds, so what can we do. Last month, a gangster-turned-politician and his brother were shot dead by vigilantes while in police custody, and before television cameras that recorded the killings. That was wrong. Extra-judicial killings and vigilantism need to be condemned. But it is also a matter of concern that the person was an MP formerly and had been elected to the UP Assembly a total of five times.

The problem of cleansing politics has a supply side and a demand side. The latter aspect means that voters need to choose clean candidates. Demand for tainted politicians should decrease. Voters should reject firmly anyone with a criminal background. However, there is also a supply problem. Voters often don’t have any “clean” choices on the ballot list. What if all the candidates contesting from a constituency are tainted?

Here comes the supply side solution. We need to put a bar on criminal candidates contesting elections. The right to contest is not a fundamental right as per the Constitution. And if the concern is that the cases against them are false cases, then their names should be cleared by the courts before they contest. Politicians complain about the politics of vendetta, where ruling parties slap false cases against opposition members. The Justice Shah committee has specified safeguards against such a possibility in its reform recommendations of 2014. It is time that voters must insist that the mere disclosure of criminal cases is not enough. We need to move from disclosure to disqualification.

The disclosure (via self-sworn affidavits) law itself came in 2003. More than 20 years have passed but the share of criminal elements is rising relentlessly. It is time we passed a strict law, as per the recommendation of the Law Commission’s report of 2014, to debar criminal candidates from contesting. There are other electoral reforms needed, too, relating to transparency in political financing, in engendering inner party democracy, and also subjecting political parties to the Right to Information law. But surely, the most urgent need is to debar at least those with serious criminal cases against them from getting a ticket to contest elections. Surely, a nation of 1.4 billion people can find a few thousand clean and non-criminal legislators.

(The writer is a noted economist) (Syndicate: The Billion Press)