A total of 236 Lok Sabha members and 71 Rajya Sabha members have criminal cases against them, according to the 18th report submitted by the amicus curiae of the Supreme Court, senior advocate Vijay Hansaria.
Hansaria has relied on a report of the Association for Democratic Rights that was published in July 2022 to submit: “236 out of 542 Lok Sabha members (44%), 71 out of 226 Rajya Sabha members (31%) and 1723 of 3991 State Legislators (43%) have criminal cases against them.”
Notably, the Amicus, in his 17th report, had pointed out that 5,097 cases are pending against MPs/MLAs, of which more than 40% (2,122) cases are pending for more than five years.
The 18th report also submits the responses received from a few high courts on the submission made by Hansaria to expedite the trial of criminal cases pending against MP/MLAs.
These reports are being filed in a plea filed by Advocate Ashwini Upadhyay, seeking directions to the Centre for necessary steps to debar candidates charged with criminal offences, from contesting elections, forming a political party, or becoming office-bearers of any party after two weeks.
The petition was filed by Upadhyay in 2016, which also sought directions to provide adequate infrastructure to set up special courts to decide criminal cases related to people representatives, public servants and members of the judiciary within one year and debar the convicted persons uniformly from legislature, executive and judiciary.
Later, a report was submitted by Hansaria, which stated that the number of criminal cases pending against sitting and former MPs and MLAs in December 2018 was 4,122. This has increased to 4,859 in September 2020, registering a jump of 17% in less than two years.
In February last year, a bench of Chief Justice NV Ramana and Justice Hima Kohli had agreed to list the matter after an urgent mentioning by the Amicus Curie.
Hansaria, while mentioning the matter had informed the bench, that the 16th report over the issue has been filed and that an urgent listing was required. The report had stated that as many as 4,984 cases are pending, of which 1,899 cases are more than five years old. In addition to this, the total number of cases pending as of December 2018 was 4,110, and as of October 2020 was 4,859. Even after the disposal of 2,775 cases after December 4, 2018, the cases against MPs/MLAs have increased to 4,984 from 4,122.
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