The Hindu Business Line : Trial by ballot

THE Railway Minister, Mr Lalu Prasad, and one of those included in the roster of "tainted Ministers" by the BJP, has advanced the postulate that any criminal charges against a politician automatically get quashed in their entirety once he gets elected to a representative forum like the Lok Sabha or State Assembly.

According to him, the electorate's verdict in favour of a candidate is tantamount to the judgment of a people's court, which is above all other courts. Thus, by virtue of having been elected to the Lok Sabha, and that too from two constituencies, he should be deemed to have been declared innocent of all the charges framed by the Courts against him.

Politicians of some other States too have been advancing the same absurd claim as a shield against attempts at prosecuting them on serious accusations of corruption, loot of the public exchequer, murder, rape and the like.

On this basis, all that a criminal needs to do is to join politics, win an election by fair means or foul and, hey presto, he can declare himself a paragon of virtue. A lot of money incurred in investigations and prolonged trials can thereby be saved, especially when it is seen that the net result even after going through all that paraphernalia is also going to be the same — his going scot-free.

The questions such a proposition raises need to be seriously examined. Are elections to be really taken as transcendental people's courts? Does victory in an election indicate the electorate's endorsement of the candidate's personal character? Perverse persons may argue that since, especially after the introduction of the mandatory requirement of filing an affidavit declaring the past and present criminal cases, the voters are in full possession of all damaging information about the candidate, by still making him the winner, they should be presumed to have given him a clean chit.

This is against all common sense. Caste/community allegiances and all manner of other influences most often dictate the voters' choice. In any case, elections cannot be surrogates for courts of law, where evidence is dispassionately weighed by trained legal minds according to tested procedures. The lengths to which the criminal class that has infiltrated into politics will go to retain and strengthen their stranglehold are truly astounding. More astounding is the fact that there are people who fall for, and even subscribe to, such notions.

B. S. Raghavan