Every sixth candidate is a crorepati

The influence of money – and not ideologies – has perceptibly gone up in the elections to the 15th Lok Sabha. There are more crorepatis in the fray than ever before. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 28, 2009, 01:22:59 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The influence of money – and not ideologies – has perceptibly gone up in the elections to the 15th Lok Sabha. There are more crorepatis in the fray than ever before.

In the 2004 elections to the 14th Lok Sabha, 9 per cent of the candidates were crorepatis. Five years later, the figure stands at 15.5 per cent, according to National Election Watch data.

The data covering the contestants for 401 parliamentary seats in the first three phases and in Delhi and Rajasthan in the fourth phase state that of the 5,573 candidates in the fray, 862 have assets of more than Rs 1 crore. The data also show sharp increases in the assets of those, who got elected in 2004. About 125 common candidates in 2004 and 2009 account for an average asset increase of over 130 per cent.

In Delhi, the increase since 2004 is 755 per cent, while it is about 450 per cent in Mumbai.

Most of the super-rich candidates come from the south and west-based regional parties. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti and the Telegu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh account for 77 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively, of crorepati candidates, while in Karnataka, about 63 per cent of the Janata Dal (United) candidates are crorepatis against the BJP 45 per cent.

In the west, about 90 per cent of the candidates put up by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena are crorepatis, while the figure for the Nationalist Congress Party is 50 per cent. In Goa, about 33 per cent of all the candidates are crorepatis.

Professor Arun Kumar of the School of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who conducted studies on the role of money in electoral politics, said, “The evil in the electoral politics of the south is money power, and not muscle power like in Bihar and UP.”

However, the national parties are not lagging far behind. Of the 356 Congress candidates, close to 50 per cent are crorepatis, while the BJP’s figure is about 40 per cent. But the Left parties have the lowest number of crorepatis in the fray. The Bahujan Samaj Party, which has the richest contestant this time – Deepak Bhardwaj worth Rs 603 crore from west Delhi – has 25.6 per cent crorepati candidates.

Gandhians and freedom fighters Shambu Nath Sharma and L.C. Jain said, “The day is not too far when Parliament will become an exclusive club of crorepatis and criminals.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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