Hyderabad: Address role of money in elections, FGG urges government

Hyderabad: While welcoming the Election Law linking Aadhaar with voter ID, which would go a long way in eliminating bogus voters and multiple entries, the Forum for Good Governance said that these do not address the main issues of 'role of money and criminalisation of politics'.

The FGG wrote a letter to the Union Law Minister explaining about the organisation's role in the electoral reforms. Forum's secretary M Padmanabha Reddy said that FGG welcomes the proposed Election Law Amendment Bill, 2021. "Linkage of Aadhaar with voter ID will go a long way to eliminate bogus voters and multiple entries.

The other amendments like four qualifying dates for registration and gender neutrality are welcome, but may not solve the problem of role of money in elections and preventing the criminals from participating in elections," the letter read. The FGG secretary said that there have been constant references to 3'M's namely Money Power, Muscle Power and Mafia Power and 4 C's that is criminalisation, communalisation, corruption and casteism. Basically, all of this has vitiated the political atmosphere in the country and even compromised the legitimacy of political process.

"Criminalisation of Politics is an issue being raised by Election Commission of India since 1998 onwards. Disqualification for criminal offences is provided for in Section 8 of Representation of Peoples Act. As per the said Section, a person is disqualified from contesting elections only on conviction by the Court of Law. There have been several instances of persons charged with serious and heinous crimes like murder, rape, dacoit etc, contesting elections, pending their trial and even getting elected in a large number of cases.

This leads to a very undesirable and embarrassing situation of law breakers becoming lawmakers and moving around under police protection," he said. He further added that the Election Commission of India proposed that the law should be amended to provide that any person who is accused of an offence punishable for five years or more should be disqualified from contesting elections even when trial is pending, provided charges have been framed against him by the competent court. So far, no action has been taken by the Government on the proposal of the Commission.

The FGG requested the Law Minister to include suitable amendments to eliminate the money power in elections and also to prevent persons with criminal antecedents from contesting elections.