The Hindu Business Line : Tainted Ministers

INDIAN democracy is now governed by a unique and paradoxical electoral culture. On the one side we profess to cherish a noble heritage of the iridescent values of an ancient civilisation which is said to have stood for rectitude, honesty, service before self and other blah-blah. On the other side, we trample with impunity those much-touted traditions.

How else to explain the fact that, at the stage of selection of candidates, all parties without exception nominate a number of persons who have been charge-sheeted by courts for grave criminal offences such as murder, rape, kidnapping, dacoity, robbery and the like? In justification, they seek to hide behind the technicality that the charges are only allegations which are yet to be proved. In offering this excuse, they take advantage of the ignorance of the lay public about the exact significance of judicial procedures.

Courts frame charges only after being satisfied about the existence of prima facie evidence of guilt. This happens midway in the trial, after which, based on the degree of admissibility and credibility of the evidence, the courts convict or acquit the persons who, in the eyes of the law and the public, are treated as accused. So, charges framed by a court are not mere aspersions or allegations that any passer-by can make, but represent a judicial finding that the accusation needs convincing rebuttal.

From this standpoint, as in healthy democracies, it is best to follow the convention of excluding judicially charge-sheeted persons from all positions of responsibility until they are formally acquitted. Inducting them into the Cabinet is the worst form of defiance of public morality. Besides, it sends wrong signals to the younger generation that if one is a politician, one can get away with murder with no questions asked. Criminalisation of politics should not be allowed to graduate to criminalisation of Councils of Ministers as well.

There is another pernicious postulate that has gained ground: that the very fact of winning an election by a candidate wipes out his criminal antecedents without any further need for scrutiny by the investigative agencies and the courts. Yet another thesis that is fouling up public life is that it is all right for persons to become Ministers, however criminal their background, so long as they keep trumpeting their mythical "secular mandate". It is sad to see certain allies of the ruling coalition trying to justify the unjustifiable.