Criminalisation of Politics

Some numbers inform, and there are numbers that indict. The affidavit placed before the Supreme Court by amicus curiae Vijay Hansaria belongs firmly to the latter category. Nearly half the Lok Sabha - 251 of 543 members - carries a criminal case. A third of the Rajya Sabha does too. Fourteen of India's twenty-eight CMs have declared criminal cases against themselves, several of them serious. More than 4,000 cases lie pending against sitting and former MPs and MLAs, a number that has barely moved since 2018 despite years of judicial monitoring. This is not a stray blemish on India's democracy; it is, by now, a defining feature of it. What ought to alarm citizens most is not any single statistic but the pattern beneath it. No political party is spared. The CMs named in the affidavit span the ideological spectrum. It suggests something more structural than the moral failing of one party or one leader: a system in which every major political formation has independently arrived at the same calculation and found it profitable.

That calculation has a name - winnability. Data shows that candidates with declared criminal cases win at more than three times the rate of those without. Parties are not blind to these realities; they are, in fact, coldly rational actors responding to an electoral market that rewards muscle, money and local notoriety over clean credentials. A candidate who can mobilise cash, intimidate rivals or command caste and community loyalty through fear is, in the brutal arithmetic of Indian elections, simply a better investment than one who cannot. Until that arithmetic changes, no party has any real incentive to reform itself unilaterally, for doing so would be to disarm in a contest where rivals remain armed.

The consequences radiate well beyond Parliament's corridors. When lawmakers are themselves law-breakers, the line separating the two collapses, and with it the moral authority of the state. Criminally tainted legislators have every reason to interfere with police postings, stall investigations and shape contracts and regulations to protect their networks rather than the public interest. Development, health and education - the unglamorous business of governing - inevitably take second place to the more urgent task of self-preservation. It is telling, if unsurprising, that constituencies represented by such figures often lag in basic indicators of governance.

The judiciary shares some blame for allowing this drift, even as it has tried, on paper, to arrest it. In November 2023, the SC directed High Courts to set up special monitoring benches and instructed special courts to avoid adjournments "except for rare and compelling reasons". Two years on, the amicus's own data show the pending caseload is essentially frozen: 1,243 cases decided in 2025 against 1,050 newly registered, a treadmill rather than a trial. Judicial directives, however well-intentioned, cannot substitute for political will, and prosecutorial machinery controlled by the very Governments whose members stand accused has little appetite for speed.

What, then, is the way forward? Several measures recur in expert commentary, and they deserve to move from report to statute. The 244th Law Commission's recommendation to criminalise false electoral affidavits, with a minimum two-year sentence attracting disqualification, would raise the cost of concealment. Dedicated, day-to-day election benches in every HC could reduce the years-long delays that currently allow the accused to contest election after election unpunished. Section 11 of the Representation of the People Act, which allows the Election Commission discretion to shorten disqualification periods, ought to be narrowed so that it cannot be used to rehabilitate those convicted of serious offences. Bringing political parties within the ambit of the RTI would expose the opaque campaign financing that makes tainted candidates attractive in the first place.

The honest answer to whether politicians will embrace such reforms is sobering: not willingly, and not soon. Reform of this kind asks incumbents to legislate away their own advantage. Real change is far more likely to come from an assertive judiciary, a vigilant Election Commission and, above all, voters who begin to treat a criminal chargesheet as disqualifying rather than incidental. Until then, the SC's affidavits will keep arriving, the numbers will keep climbing, and politics will keep looking less like the seat of law-making and more like a chargesheet with a seating plan.