The Hindu Business Line : Lok Satta collecting antecedents of candidates

LOK Satta, an organisation that is spearheading a campaign against criminalisation of politics since the past five years, is collecting the antecedents of all the candidates of recognised political parties contesting in the country in the ensuing elections to the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies in various States. The Election Commission is assisting the organisation in this regard.

Disclosing this to newspersons here on Saturday, the National Coordinator of Lok Satta, Mr Jayaprakash Narayan, said the details collected would be available on the organisation's new Web site, www.indiaelectionwatch.com. Apart from the criminal antecedents, if any, the site would display the candidate's asset base and how much the person was actually claiming.

Lok Satta on Saturday released a list of 51 prospective candidates with criminal antecedents in Andhra Pradesh politics as a part of its "AP Election Watch 2004" campaign. Of these, 25 prospective candidates belong to the Telugu Desam Party, 23 to the Congress, one independent and one each to the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi.

Mr Narayan said that Lok Satta had constituted a 29-member committee under the chairmanship of Mr Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy, former Chairman of Law Commission of India, to screen the antecedents of prospective candidates.

The committee adopted nine-point criteria for evaluating the record of prospective candidates, which included whether the person was convicted in any case, whether charges were framed against him by a magistrate and whether his name was in the rowdy sheet or history sheet maintained by the police.

He said that Lok Satta was releasing the list of prospective candidates so as to pressure the political parties not to nominate candidates with criminal antecedents. "It is not enough to just wait and see for the parties to act. We should actually prevent them from contesting," he pointed out.

Mr Narayan said that the Lok Satta campaign against criminalisation of politics had yielded rich dividends. In Andhra Pradesh, major political parties stopped fielding any new candidate with a criminal record. However, established candidates who have struck deep political roots continued to be in the fray. The major issue today was how to prevent such persons from entering the electoral fray.