Taking risk

While the Supreme Court’s verdict that conviction by a court will invite immediate disqualification for a person from contesting elections is welcome, its ruling that a person in jail or in police custody cannot contest elections will not find ready acceptance.

The ruling may be well-intentioned as another attempt to bar the entry of criminals into legislative forums. Its logic is also clear. The law says that a candidate for an election should be an elector. But it also says that a person in jail or custody cannot vote and therefore cannot be deemed an elector. The inference, when the legal requirement and the bar are read together, is that a person in jail or custody is ineligible to contest. But the ruling is bound to be misused and might lead to deliberate blocking of the candidature of genuine contestants who may not have committed any crime.

Governments and influential persons can scuttle the candidature of a person by getting him arrested by the police on flimsy or even on trumped up charges before the date for submission of nominations. This is a real possibility because governments, parties and individual politicians are known to pursue vendetta politics and do not shirk from using the most unfair means to win elections. Law and order is a state subject. Governments at the state level routinely use the police against political opponents, and the ruling will give them a new opening. The Central government can also use the CBI against persons it  does not want to contest elections.

It would be wrong to deny the right to contest elections to persons against whom charges have not even been framed. Undertrials await trial and judgment for many years. Those who are on bail are not covered by the judgment, but in an environment where bail is the exception and the not the norm as it should be, it may not give much relief to many targeted candidates. It is also known that bail can be manipulated. The part of the judgment that bars convicted people from contesting elections from jail is unexceptionable. But the bar on contests from custody calls for review, clarification, amendment or safeguards against misuse.  Safeguards are also difficult to implement in such cases.  The Election Commission’s view that the bar should apply only to those against whom charges were framed six months before the date of nomination may be considered. But even this can be misused.