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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Sep 26, 2018, 07:05 AM IST
The Supreme Court has lobbed the ball back to Parliament’s court asking the latter to deal with growing criminalisation of politics.
The law has to be made by Parliament, said the apex court, in order to disqualify legislators with proven criminal antecedents. There is no denying the fact that criminals have entered the political system through the electoral route, using money, muscle power and political patronage to gain some amount of legitimacy.
As the SC observed, while drawing upon the NN Vohra Committee’s findings,the rot runs very deep since a parallel government is being run by criminals. In an earlier hearing, CJI Dipak Misra was particularly scathing when he said that “corruption is a noun but becomes a verb when it enters the political arena.”
What’s interesting is that the five-judge bench recalled the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, which highlighted “the collaboration of a diffused network of criminal gangs, police, custom officials and their political patrons”. The SC’s directions to rectify “an extremely disastrous and lamentable situation” will require a robust system that will not buckle under political pressure.
Since democracy is all about options and that only the best candidate should win, the Court wants the electorate to take an informed decision. So a candidate as well as the concerned political party shall issue a declaration in the widely circulated newspapers in the locality about his/her antecedents and also give wide publicity in the electronic media.
The system is infested with criminals because of a thriving nexus between the politician and lawless elements. They need each other to survive and subvert the democratic process. But no party is willing to address the problem head on. People living in glass houses do not throw stones at others.
