Is the Indian polity becoming a Parliament of fouls? According to a TOI report, the figures for serious criminal charges are between 20 and 200 times higher among members of Parliament than among the general population at large.
What is it about Indian politics that makes it so conducive to criminal activity? Is it that it is largely the criminally inclined who are drawn to politics in India? Or is it that the country’s system of politics has become so tainted with illegality that even decent individuals soon find themselves corrupted?
Whatever the reason, India’s Parliament has increasingly come to resemble the local chapter of Mafia Inc. Those who backed the ordinance which sought to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that legislators sentenced for crimes carrying a sentence of two years or more in prison would lose their elected seats may have had a point. If all legislators so sentenced – a la Lalu Prasad – were to lose their seats, Parliament might well find itself so depopulated as to confront the country with a deficiency of democracy.
Pursuing this line of argument it could be reasoned that in order to safeguard our increasingly criminalised democracy, instead of making convicted legislators give up their seats, measures must be taken to ensure that sentenced MPs retain their seats, come what may. In order to do this, it would be necessary to override the SC ruling via a constitutional amendment requiring a two-third majority vote in Parliament.
Towards this laudable end, all political parties must in future field candidates with suitably impressive criminal credentials, and see to it that they get elected, by hook or by crook, quite literally. If voters in a particular constituency are so disobliging as to reject all the candidates because of their criminal records, a re-election fielding the same set of candidates should be held and a satisfactory result obtained by the tried-and-tested expedient of booth-capturing.
Eventually we would get a Parliament composed wholly of criminal elements. Such a Parliament could devise appropriate legislation to solve, once and for all, the vexatious problem of the criminalisation of politics. It would do this by using its supreme legislative authority to decriminalise not politics – not just an impossible task, but also an undesirable one, given the circumstances – but to decriminalise crime itself.
If crime, of all variety, were to be legitimised by parliamentary diktat, not just politics but all of society would at one stroke be made totally, 100% crime-free. Thanks to its uniquely innovative Parliament, India would be the first country in the world to achieve this distinction.
Henceforth, state awards and honours would be bestowed on thugs, goons and scamsters who showed the most enterprise and ingenuity in their chosen field of activity. By the same token, those displaying the reprehensible and anti-social traits of honesty and uprightness would be suitably punished for their errant ways. 8 Outlawry would be the order of the day, and dishonesty would not only be the best policy but the only policy. A Parliament full of MPs – Mafia Politicos – would ensure this. Criminals of India unite, you have nothing to lose but your crimes.
(Source: Column “Second Opinion” by Mr. Jug Suraiya in the Times of India dated 16-10-2013.)
