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V. Venkatesan

New Delhi: The 2009 Lok Sabha elections will see the robust participation of civil society groups in monitoring the poll process. The contribution of at least two such groups needs to be watched.

The National Election Watch (NEW) is a nationwide campaign of more than 1200 Non-Governmental Organisations and citizen groups working for electoral reforms, and improving democracy and governance. Active in almost all States, NEW has done election watch for all Assembly and Lok Sabha polls since 2002.

The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) is another NGO whose December 1999 public interest litigation (PIL) led to the March 13, 2003 Supreme Court judgment requiring disclosure by the candidates of their educational, financial and criminal details. Since then ADR has done election watch studies during almost all State Assembly and Lok Sabha elections.

Both these groups have come out with startling data on the role of criminals in the electoral process, by just accessing the information in the affidavits filed by the candidates (as carried on the Election Commission’s Web site) for the last Lok Sabha elections, and for the subsequent Assembly elections on various States Election Department Web sites.

NEW, for example, has analysed affidavits filed in the earlier elections by 278 candidates, who will contest for for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. It found that 63 of them had criminal records. Of these, 39 had, according to affidavits filed earlier, serious criminal cases, such as murder, attempt to murder, robbery, theft, or kidnapping, against them.

This list of candidates with serious charges included 14 from the BJP, 13 from the BSP, five each from the Congress and Samajwadi Party, and two from the CPI(M). NEW points out on its Web site that this information may have changed since.

When new affidavits are filed for the April-May elections, NEW will do further analyses and disseminate the information on all candidates.

Information of candidates declared by the parties has been collected and their names have been matched to those in the NEW database which is based on the affidavits filed by these candidates for earlier elections.

NEW has come out with a list of demands on electoral reforms for inclusion in party manifestoes. These include banning of candidates against whom criminal charges of heinous nature have been framed; inclusion of a button in the Electronic Voting Machines saying, “None of the Above”; declaration of candidate’s income and its sources along with assets; strict action against excessive use of money in elections; independent verification of information in the affidavits; and a comprehensive law to regulate political parties, their finances, inner workings, etc.

Of interest is the identification of 20 ‘Red Alert’ constituencies on the basis of criminal antecedents of their representatives in the 14th Lok Sabha.

NEW is planning special campaign to educate the voters in these constituencies.

This list contains only those constituencies where the elected MPs have faced serious criminal charges such as murder, attempt to murder, extortion, rape, kidnapping, robbery, dacoity, etc. Information about these constituencies and the MPs are available on www.nocriminals.org and www.adrindia.org .

The ‘Red Alert’ constituencies are in Madhya Pradesh (Bhind, Dhar), Punjab (Amritsar), Uttar Pradesh (Faizabad, Machhlishahr, Pratapgarh, Phulpur), West Bengal (Jhargram, Berhampore, Murshidabad), Bihar (Balia, Gopalganj, Kishanganj, Siwan, Purnea), Andhra Pradesh (Nalgonda), Kerala (Palghat), Tamil Nadu (Chennai North), Jharkhand (Godda), and Karnataka (Chamarajanagar).

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