Tuesday 24 March 2009

Modern day Chameleon - Politician = Criminal

Modern day Chameleon - Politician = Criminal

Increasingly we find a situation of criminals morphing into politicians to escape the arms of law.

As part of National Election Watch (NEW) AP Chapter we have been trying to track the records of Politicians competing in elections and trying to occupy a high seat in society. The efforts have been on since a fortnight.

Data coming out through these efforts using RTI, Election Affidavits filed by candidates etc. is damning.

My dreams for clean political representatives seem to be in danger of remaining just that - Dreams.

In 2004 elections for the Legislative Assembly of Andhra Pradesh 52 candidates had various pending criminal cases against them. The number is out of a large number of 1890 contestants.

Mr.Padmanabha Reddy a Committee Member of NEW AP had obtained information on pending criminal cases against sitting MLAs, MPs, MLCs and their relatives under RTI Act. The information came after a long series of struggles by him for almost 4 months (Oct 08 to Jsn 09)

Rakesh, a good friend and myself did an analysis of the data.

The information obtained is the reason for my dreams being shattered. Out of 294 MLAs and 60 MPs from Andhra Pradesh, 60 MLAs and 10 MPs have criminal cases pending against them.

Complete details can be downloaded here.

It seems to be an indication of things to come and that has me worried. Congress (INC) has released a list of contestants for the Assembly in Andhra Pradesh. Out of 290 candidates we have data available as of now on 135 candidates. 20 have criminal charges pending against them. That is a whopping 15%. I am almost sure that the percentage will not go down even on getting info about rest of the candidates.

We held a press meet on the same issues on 23rd March 2009. The following is the press coverage.

Deccan Chronicle

Times of India

Hindu

Eenadu


Andhra Jyothi













We will be comparing the affidavits with information available with us and bring to the notice of Election Commission if there are any discrepancies.

The Battle has started to realise our dream of Clean Politics. Let us start with candidates and keep up the efforts to expose these dirty and tainted candidates to the voters.