House for moneybags: The Rajya Sabha story

Media tycoons, real estate magnates and others flush with cash are increasingly taking the Upper House way to Parliament, leading to conflict of interest

When MP Achuthan, a CPI leader from Kerala, made his debut in the Rajya Sabha in 2009, he had assets worth a little over Rs 16 lakh and liabilities close to Rs 4 lakh.

Achuthan didn’t set the House on fire with his oratory, but he was diligent in his parliamentary work. It was his letters to the then prime minister Manmohan Singh that put Walmart in a spot in connection with its Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in India, which investigative agencies found violated laws. Seven years after his retirement from the Upper House, Achuthan’s assets remain almost the same and he continues to serve his party.

A year after Achuthan entered the Rajya Sabha, industrialist Vijay Mallya, too, became a member of the Upper House from Karnataka after a gap of two years.

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This was Mallya’s second term in Parliament and the whole political spectrum backed the flamboyant, cigarillo-smoking liquor baron.

As an independent MP, Mallya served in various parliamentary committees as well. And then one day, he was gone. Months before his term was to end, Mallya fled the country following a loan fraud of over Rs 9,000 crore. Now, he is in the UK fighting extradition to India.

Take the case of Jharkhand Rajya Sabha elections in March 2012. The Election Commission had to countermand the polls for two seats following incidents of “horse trading and use of money power to influence the voters".

Businessmen and moneybags entering Parliament is nothing new. Politics and big business are deeply enmeshed; each feeding off the other, with democracy being the loser. Conflict of interest be damned.

The latest round of Rajya Sabha elections gave us another glimpse of this pernicious trend. Two independent candidates, both media barons, took a shot at the polls. One of them, Kartikeya Sharma, promoter of NewsX, won from Haryana while Subhash Chandra, the owner of Zee Group, lost from Rajasthan.

Chandra, a sitting Rajya Sabha MP, chose to fight from Rajasthan where the ruling Congress alone did not have strength to get its third candidate elected.

With the Congress looking vulnerable, Chandra parachuted into the desert state, setting cat among the pigeons.

He got the support of the opposition BJP, which promised to transfer its surplus votes to the media baron. But Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot thwarted Chandra’s bid and ensured a Congress victory.

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“This is the defeat of those powers who wanted to buy Rajasthan's self-respect in the vote market,” Congress chief spokesperson Randeep S Surjewala, a winner from Rajasthan, said.

In Haryana, where the Opposition Congress was on the edge, Sharma’s entry put paid to the hopes of Congress general secretary Ajay Maken.

Backed by the ruling BJP and its allies, Sharma scraped through by a whisker. In both cases, the BJP did not think twice about supporting the two candidates.

“We would have understood if the BJP had fielded a party leader. Everybody knows why they were fielded,” a senior Congress leader said.

Karnataka also saw similar allegations when the JD(S) fielded former MP D Kupendra Reddy, one of the richest candidates, this time.

The entry of such leaders raises the all-important question of conflict of interest.

Mallya, who ran the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, was a member of the Standing Committee on Commerce and member of Consultative Committee on Civil Aviation.

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Reddy, a real estate magnate, was part of the Select Committee on the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Bill, 2013. In both the cases, there were claims of conflict of interest.

There are allegations that certain parties choose to send industrialists or nominees of corporations for political funding.

The Aam Aadmi Party was under scanner when it chose candidates from Delhi for the Rajya Sabha seats and when it sent five candidates from Punjab recently. The JD(S) and the BSP, too, had faced similar allegations in the past.

"It is a dangerous symptom. Moneybags in Parliament see this as an investment and protection mechanism," Congress Lok Sabha Whip Manickam Tagore told DH. He said those involved with big businesses use their clout to get banks to favour them. Equally, it is problematic that big business also sometimes manages to get its nominees as candidates, he added.

It is nobody’s case that a businessman or a wealthy person should not enter politics or fight elections. But what is unacceptable is such people buying their way into Parliament and being in a position to frame laws that favour their businesses.