CRIMINALISATION OF POLITICS : NEED FOR FUNDAMENTAL REFORM

As regards the state of law and order, one can discern a perceptible decline during all these years and the situation today is such that the chances of procuring the conviction of culprits in major offences have become increasingly remote. The reason is that the politicians take the help and support of criminal elements at the time of elections. Tfie criminals and anti-social elements in their turn seek the help of politicians when they are in difficulty at the hands of law-enforcement agencies... The politicians accordingly interfere in the investigation of cases involving major crimes and thus render the task of investigating agencies in procuring incriminating evidence extremely difficult. Things have since then taken a worse turn. Many of the criminals have been seized with the idea that if they can get others elected with their muscle power, why should they not themselves seek election to the legislatures? Many of them contested as candidates and quite a number of them have been actually elected. Some of them have even come to occupy ministerial chairs. Experience also tells that once a person becomes a Legislator or a Minister, all criminal proceedings against him are consigned to pigeonholes where they lie dormant... The criminal isation of politics has not merely caused deep erosion in the healthy and clean functioning of our democratic polity, its fall-out in other spheres has been no less disastrous. (Khanna, 1994: 265-66).