Indians are used to seeing their filmstars sell products on TV but, probably for the first time, one of them

is trying to sell informed judgement. The Association for Democratic Reform’s ‘Sacche Chuno, Acche

abundant in talent, its representatives often seem sub-standard, or

downright bad. Twenty-three per cent of the outgoing MPs have

criminal cases against them. The 543 sitting MPs have a total of 333

serious criminal cases against them, with 229 of these charges being

for violent crimes, such as murder, rape or armed robbery.

Though the compulsory public disclosure of the criminal record for all

candidates is a recent initiative, we tried to reconstruct the historical record for Uttar Pradesh based on a

survey carried out in 2003. According to that survey, 3 per cent of the top two candidates in the 1969

Assembly polls had a criminal record. By 1980, this was up to 7 per cent, by 1996, to 16 per cent. What

is most worrying is that in the 2004 general elections, using data for Bihar and UP, we found that the

criminals bring to the table.

Starting with the second theory first, one thing that many of the candidates are clearly selling is identity.

In the 1996 UP Assembly elections, the share of the two upper caste parties (BJP and Congress) was

only 39 per cent in constituencies with a higher than average share of low castes and 69 per cent in the

areas where the share of the low castes was lower than the average. But in the 1980 Assembly elections

in UP, these two parties won more of the vote in the low-caste dominated areas than elsewhere.

For well-known reasons — the rise of the SP and the BSP, the Mandal Commission Report, etc — voters

from both high and low castes became much more identity conscious between 1980 and 1996, so that

parties which offered the right caste credentials could get away with offering less in terms of candidate

quality. It is only in areas where neither group was dominant that there continued to be a level playing

another caste is available.

Does that mean that voters know enough but don’t care enough? During last year’s Delhi elections, SNS,

an NGO, filed a series of Right to Information cases in order to extract information about the

performance of the sitting MLAs. This included how they had spent their annual Rs 2 crore development

funds, as well as how often they had participated in the committees where they are supposed to

represent their constituents. Hindustan combined this information with data from the mandatory

disclosures by all candidates regarding criminal history, education, and personal assets, and printed the

same in a concise format for a set of ten constituencies, in the week before the election.

A group of eight NGOs then distributed free copies of these newspapers in 200 polling stations, chosen

by lottery to ensure that they were comparable to all the others where the newspapers were not

distributed. While candidates with serious criminal records got about 9 per cent more votes in general,

the newspaper distribution appears to have effectively cut the electorate’s preference for criminals in half.

However, one could make the case that this effect is the result of priming: it is conceivable that the

per cent increase in vote share in polling stations where this information was made available, as

compared to where it wasn’t.

Knowing that information matters is, of course, just the first step. The challenge is how to get a country

as big as India to pay attention. Perhaps initiatives such as the ADR campaign are sufficient, though it’s

possible that they rely too heavily on people being pro-active. What’s clear is that this is a historic

moment in the battle to make Indian democracy worth the billion hopes invested in it.