The list of charges against Indian politician Kameshwar Baitha is long and startling: 16 counts of murder, 25 of attempted murder, six of assault with a dangerous weapon, three of extortion and so on.
In many democratic countries, such severe criminal allegations would be catastrophic to a politician’s chances of winning a seat in the nation’s parliament.
Yet Baitha says the 109 charges, wracked up during his time as a Maoist insurgent in his home state of eastern Jharkhand, will not dent his chances at the ballot box as he seeks re-election in the mammoth elections underway in India.
Photo: AFP
“The kind of work I’ve done, and particularly my focus on the weakest social groups in my constituency, is what makes me popular,” Baitha said, dismissing the charges as false. “Everyone knows that I am the man to beat.”
Fighting corruption and cleaning up Indian politics are major issues at this election, particularly for middle-class and urban voters.
The five-week voting process ends on May 12 with results due four days later.
Baitha, who first won his seat in 2009, said voters in the impoverished and mainly tribal forest belt of northeastern Jharkhand see him as a Robin Hood-type figure.
“You are sitting in distant Delhi — come to the region and you’ll know what the people have to say about it, what they think of these cases,” Baitha said, becoming angry on the telephone.
Almost one-fifth of candidates standing for the 543-seat parliament face criminal charges, according to an analysis by the Association for Democratic Reform, a Delhi-based think tank.
They are not only in remote and poor areas like Jharkhand, but at the center of power in India.
Five of the seven candidates contesting for the election frontrunner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi face charges, albeit relatively minor ones.
A key aide of BJP’s leader, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who is tipped to become Indian prime minister on a platform of clean governance and strong leadership, is being investigated for alleged murder and extortion.
Traditionally, voters have not been troubled by criminal charges in a country where millions still vote strictly along caste and regional lines.
They also often believe false allegations are leveled by political opponents, with police and the judiciary — who have a reputation for corruption — obliging by laying charges.
“There is a lot of truth to this. Some of the charges are politically motivated and trumped up,” said Satish Misra, an analyst with the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation.
“But there are also a lot of serious criminals in politics,” said Misra, who has analyzed elections in India for three decades.
Misra blames India’s traditional feudal culture.
Even after the country’s democratic system was introduced, politicians still used so-called muscle-men and later money-men to “influence” voters and shoehorn them into power.
“The nexus between crime and politics is very strong,” he said.
Even when pressure grows on politicians to quit over allegations, they can often find a way around it. Lalu Prasad Yadav — a longtime head of Bihar, one of India’s most populous states — simply installed his wife when he was forced to step down in 1997 over long-running corruption charges.
Between the two of them, the couple ruled the state uninterrupted from 1990 to 2005 and Yadav went on to be a member of the Indian National Parliament and railways minister.
Under new rules set by the Indian Supreme Court, he was stripped of his parliamentary seat in September last year after being convicted over a scam involving the misuse of funds for animal fodder in the 1990s.
The new rules make it illegal for politicians found guilty of serious crimes to stay in office, although convictions can take decades.
The electorate is increasingly demanding a clean-up of politics with momentum growing thanks to anti-corruption campaigner Arvind Kejriwal, who has tapped into seething public anger over graft.
After making a stunning debut at state polls in Delhi late last year, Kejriwal’s party is tipped to win a handful of seats in these elections.
The former tax inspector’s message has resonated with many voters and forced the scandal-plagued Indian Congress Party, in power since 2004, and the BJP to take up the pledge of cleaner government.
“They [voters] know that if corrupt elements win the election, you will get corrupt governance,” the Association for Democratic Reform’s Trilochan Sastry said.
Baitha, a candidate for a regional party who has told media he was only an ideological not a militant leader of a banned insurgent group, seems unphased by the shifting mood.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS