The most chilling part of the Madhumita murder case has been this: The sinking feeling that the murder of the young poet and the subsequent attempts to choreograph an official cover-up in Lucknow speak of a deeper syndrome of contemporary politics. The alleged involvement of the minister, the police’s unsubtle efforts to tamper with or ignore crucial pieces of evidence, the belated sacking of the minister — all the elements of the ongoing drama in Uttar Pradesh provoke more deja vu than horror. After all, we’ve heard of the crime-politics nexus in UP. There doesn’t seem any point anymore in even asking just how Amar Mani Tripathi became a minister in the Mayawati government in the first place — a man dismissed from an earlier government for his involvement in a kidnapping case and who has a plethora of criminal cases against his name. But such things don’t happen only in UP, or only in the BSP. Meet Adhir Chowdhary, Congress MP from Berhampore in ‘bhadralok’ West Bengal. A report in this paper cast the spotlight on this representative of the people who has figured in at least half a dozen murder cases, carries a revolver always, and runs a parallel justice system. ‘‘At times, it gets physical but it works.’’ he smugly told this paper.How did we get here? How did the mechanisms of political representation get distorted so? Where do we go from here? While the increasing ‘‘criminalisation of politics’’ has provoked much handwringing in seminars in recent times, the sad fact is that it is still only a politically correct buzzword. We still don’t have a coherent agenda for political reform. The recent institutional cat-fight which broke out over the Electoral Reforms Act, passed last year after a unique all-party consensus in Parliament, is a case in point. The Act followed a Supreme Court order that mandated disclosures by candidates of all criminal cases against them, among other things. It was struck down as ‘unconstitutional’ by the Supreme Court earlier this year, on the deserved charge of paying lip service to the spirit of the order. Clearly, an agenda for political reform continues to flounder in the absence of political will. It also remains elusive for another reason — nobody seems to have fully thought it through.Is reform simply to be about tightening the legal screws on our MPs and MLAs? Will we get it only by tightening Section B of the Representation of People Act 1951 to prevent persons with criminal records from contesting elections? Perhaps we also need to talk about the other changes that are necessary — like a more engaged public debate, or a more demanding norm of political representation, to begin with just two. It would be truly tragic if UP’s latest political scandal is also put down to politics as usual.
