Indian politics plumbed new depths last week after a senior leader showered potential voters with wads of c cash at an election rally in southern Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital.
Images of D K Shivakumar from the opposition Congress Party tossing stacks of 500 Indian rupee bills (€5.60) from the roof of his campaign bus into the milling crowd at Bevinahalli, 100km southwest of Bangalore, went viral, provoking mixed reactions from political parties.
The incident took place a day before the federal election commission officially announced May 10th as polling day to elect a new Karnataka state legislature, the outcome of which will be announced three days later.
Shivakumar, a seven-time legislator and former minister, is among the richest of Indian politicians, with assets of more than €94 million which he formally declared while filing his nomination for the 2018 state polls.
Karnataka is ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but preliminary opinion polls indicate that the Congress Party could form the next government for five years, possibly headed by Shivkumar.
The Congress Party defended Shivakumar’s brazen scattering of money to voters, calling it “a bit exuberant”, but neither illegal nor unethical.
Party spokesman Dinesh Gundu Rao told NDTV news channel that since the voting schedule had not been formally announced, ”giving or spending money” was not unlawful as the ”moral code” of electoral conduct which proscribes bribing voters was not in force.
The BJP, however, criticised Shivakumar’s act of throwing money around as irresponsible and demanded his prosecution.
While Shivakumar’s audacity was indisputably distinctive, he was merely extending the boundaries most Indian political parties routinely pursue by offering incentives to voters ahead of polls. These include mobile telephones, laptops, assorted household goods, saris, televisions and bicycles.
In the 2014 parliamentary elections, for instance, the two principal political parties in neighbouring Tamil Nadu state offered voters gold chains, a 50 per cent subsidy for working women to buy scooters, and in some rural constituencies, cows and goats.
Over the years, such expensive giveaways have eclipsed the more traditional promises of free electricity for farmers and rural households, good roads, free travel for women in local buses and assurances of employment, said Editors Guild of India president Seema Mustafa.
“In an era of social media and 24X7 television news channels”, she said, “parliamentary and state elections in India have become fiercely competitive, forcing political parties to offer assorted goodies with impunity”.
Complaints by candidates or political parties to the election commission that supervises parliamentary and state elections were ineffective, officials said.
“The commission cannot do much as its jurisdiction begins only after the poll schedule is announced, which is 45 days before polling,” said former chief election commissioner S Y Quraishi. Offering voters gifts and enticements, he said, begins long before election dates are announced.
Another concern is the inordinately high number of MPs and state legislators facing criminal cases.
Indian electoral rules do not bar potential candidates facing criminal charges from contesting polls, but they mandate their resignation if they are convicted while in office. But in India’s notoriously slow judicial system, most of these cases linger on interminably, permitting these politicians to participate in successive elections.
In late 2022, senior lawyer Vijay Hansari, who is an impartial adviser to India’s supreme court in a case seeking to expedite trials against sitting and former parliamentarians and state legislators, revealed that 3,096 criminal cases involving both groups remained unresolved. Of these, about a third had been pending for more than five years.
According to the independent Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) poll watchdog, 43.2 per cent – or 233 of the 539 MPs elected in 2019 – stand accused of crimes ranging from inciting hatred to murder.
The ADR revealed that the number of criminally charged MPs had increased by 17 per cent since the 2014 election, which had sent 185 such lawmakers to parliament, signifying a “steep decline” in overall political standards, values and morality.
MPs from prime minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government led this 2019 list, with 116 facing criminal charges – including six for murder- followed by 29 from the Congress Party and the remaining 88 from smaller regional parties, according to the ADR.
Back in Karnataka, the ADR revealed that of 221 legislators elected in 2018, 35 per cent faced criminal charges that included attempted murder and kidnapping.