One aspect that emerges after the results have been declared and that the Association for Democratic Reforms has highlighted in its analysis, is that 16 of the MLAs-elect in the State have criminal cases against them. This works out to 40 per cent of the total MLAs. It is not just that but of the 16, there are 13, which is one third of the strength of the Assembly, who have declared serious criminal cases against them. In comparison in the last Assembly elections in 2017 there were nine MLAs with criminal cases of which six had declared serious criminal cases. The 2017 figures were lower, which means that the number has gone up considerably this time. It raises the question of whether the criminal antecedents of the candidates are not a factor that voters take into consideration when voting.
In December last, the Election Commission of India team in Goa to oversee the arrangements for the 2022 Legislative Assembly polls had announced that all political parties will have to make public the criminal antecedents of the candidates and also reveal the reasons for selecting candidates with criminal antecedents. The idea was that voters have complete knowledge of the candidate so they can make an informed choice. Those looking to clean up the political system believed that this could force parties to look for candidates with a clean record, but as has now been revealed, the number of MLA elected with criminal records is far higher than the previous election. The move to cleanse politics has quite clearly not worked.
In August last year, the Supreme Court had noted an ‘alarming increase of criminals in politics’ and in an attempt towards decriminalising politics, had directed that political parties publish the criminal antecedents of candidates within 48 hours of their selection. Goa’s first election after that judgement and after the new rules of disclosure should have been an opportunity to vote out persons with criminal antecedents, but it has resulted in the just the opposite. The potential to clean up the political system has been lost. For the next five years, Goa can do little about this. But one aspect that comes across here is that it is not just the parties that are to be held responsible for selecting candidates with criminal antecedents, but also the people who have voted for them, with the knowledge of the criminal cases.
The other aspect that was highlighted, is the money power where 187 candidates of the 301 were ‘crorepatis’ and 39 of the 40 MLAs-elect belong to the crorepati club. The only exception is the member of the Revolutionary Goans Party. All the other winners have declared assets worth more than Rs 1 crore, with the average assets per MLA now calculated at Rs 20.16 crore, which again has risen from 2017 when it was Rs 10.9 crore. So Goa now has a richer group of MLAs, though in recent past elections the MLAs were almost all crorepatis.
What emerges from this is that Goa’s politics has been dominated by people from the richer classes for years and that now muscle power is also on the rise. The increase in MLAs with criminal cases has shown that any brush that the candidate may have had with the law does not necessarily weigh in with the voters when it comes to selecting who they are going to vote. Yet, there are people who constantly seek that there be clean candidates and that they be provided with a fair choice. They could be in a minority as the results have just shown that those with criminal cases have not been voted out, an indication that there are people unconcerned with criminalisation of politics.
