Nitish Kumar's victory at the hustings in Bihar is being described as the that of development-oriented governance over caste-based politics. On the face of it, this rightly sums up results. The numbers of the poll results, however, hide others — the darker side of this victory.
A total of 141 MLAs out of 241 analysed by Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and National Election Watch (NEW), a nationwide campaign comprising of more than 1200 NGOs and other citizen-led organisations, had declared pending criminal cases in their affidavits. Out of these 141, 85 MLAs have declared that they have serious criminal cases pending of them. They include such heinous criminal cases as such as murder, attempt to murder, abducting in order to murder, theft, illegal payments in connection with elections, etc, against them. All this in their own words. Affidavits of two MLAs were either not available or were illegible.
The criminalisation of Bihar politics had not ended with Lalu Prasad Yadav five years ago — the results show that close to 60 per cent of those who will be making laws in the state for the next five have been accused of breaking them, time and again.
Whether Nitish Kumar's image is clean may or may not be a matter of debate, but what is certainly not are the candid admissions of as many as 58 of his party's MLAs whose affidavits were analysed by ADR/NEW. In fact, 43 of Janata Dal (United) have serious criminal charges pending against them. That's quite a baggage that Nitish has to carry with him around. Would this mean that he won only because his alliance was marginally better Lalu's?
Others are no better. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has an equal number (58) of MLAs out of the 90 whose affidavits were studied. More than half (13) of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)'s 22 MLAs were also found to have criminal charges pending against them. This time 85 MLAs out of these 141 have declared pending serious IPC charges like murder and attempt to murder charges against them. In 2005, 68 MLAs had serious pending criminal cases.
The people may have voted for development-oriented governance over caste-based politics, but that doesn't mean that the Assembly is a cleaner place today. In fact, there is significant increase in the number of MLAs with not only pending criminal cases but also with serious pending criminal cases. In 2005 Bihar Assembly, 117 (i.e.35 per cent) MLAs had pending criminal cases.
Let's also look at the money factor. Of 241 MLAs analysed, 47 have declared that their assets are more than a crore, i.e. about 20 per cent of the MLAs are crorepatis. The highest assets declared are Rs 15.83 crore by Dr Faiyaj Ahmad of RJD from Bisfi Constituency followed by Suresh Kumar Sharma from BJP with Rs 8.27 crore. In 2005 there were eight crorepati MLAs while this time the number has swollen considerably. The JD(U), needless to say, tops the list with 27 crorepatis.
Bihar surely is developing under Nitish Kumar; so are his MLAs.
In these days of scam revelations, one would not be surprised if one springs out of Nitish Kumar's hat. It will only be the people of Bihar who would be betrayed if this government were to fall, or even be tainted, by a scam bigger than Lalu's innumerable ones. Unfortunately, certain symptoms are beginning to show.
