Former babus join hands to make politics crime-free

Former bureaucrats and young professionals are jumping into the hurly-burly of politics, not shying away from dirtying their hands. Last year, former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Bimal Jalan, who is also a Rajya Sabha MP, launched the Public Interest Foundation (PIF), which is leading a campaign to ensure that criminals are kept out of politics.

Among his other associates were Suresh Neotia, former Ambassador to the US Naresh Chandra, CII chief mentor Tarun Das, economist and consultant Arun Maira, industrialist Harshvardhan Neotia, dramatist Shyamanand Jalan and retired IAS officer Anil Kumar.

According to PIF, one-fourth of candidates who stood in the previous Lok Sabha elections (2004) had some criminal cases pending against them. “Raising levels of awareness in these times of coalition governments is urgent. Today, five people in a Parliament of 545 can decide what kind of government we have, and can influence policies. We can’t allow people with criminal records to decide the path the country takes,” says Jalan.

 

Not that earlier political parties were clean, he says. “It is just that today’s coalition politics is seeing components grow smaller in size. If four or five people in a party of 30 were bad earlier, it didn’t matter so much but today a faction of five people can make or break a government,” he says.

Jalan’s foundation is going to bombard voters with information through SMS on candidates in their constituencies. This he says could lead to voters thinking twice before casting their vote, and parties thinking several times before nominating candidates.

Jalan is not alone in this clean India effort. In Bangalore, RK Mishra has launched a website ‘Change India’ that has forum in major cities where citizens are taking part in putting their ideas together to be part of the change they want.

Janagraha, a Bangalore-based NGO, has launched a campaign named Jaago Re to ensure that more and more people cast their votes.

Similarly, leading public figures such as Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata, E Sreedharan, the man behind the success of Delhi Metro, former Chief Vigilance Commissioner N Vittal and former Election Commissioner TS Krishnamuthy joined hands last year to launch a platform called the Forum for Restoration of Values.

Says Ramesh Ramanathan of the forum: “The forum was started by the Bhoomananda Theertha Swami of Kerala and we focus not on the grassroots, but at the very top of the establishment. We want the most successful to be behind the change in various spheres of life.”

The organisation is, meanwhile, upset at the way the media has been used to splash advertisements about government programmes ahead of the general elections. “We are planning to take the issue to court,” says Ramanathan.

The mother of all these forums is the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which was founded by a group of professors from the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and National Institute of Design, besides some alumni of the IIM. The forum works towards strengthening democracy and governance in the country by focusing on fair and transparent electoral processes.

Following a petition filed by ADR in the Supreme Court, the Election Commission made it mandatory for candidates to declare their criminal records before elections.

Says Jagdeep S Chokkar, former professor at IIM-A: “We launched this organisation in 2003 when five states went to polls and began publishing data on criminal records. In response, 1,200 NGOs and groups across the country joined us. Currently, we have presence in every state. We will be more than happy if more groups come up provided they are not inspired by vested interests.”

While every state used to have a regional election watch scanning the background of candidates, last year, all of them linked up to form the National Election Watch. Today the data is being used by various new outfits to smoke out crime from politics.

But clean governance and politics now seems to be on everybody’s agenda whether it is NGOs or citizen bodies.