Ajit Ranade
In late February 2026, a Delhi court discharged all 23 accused in the excise policy case, ruling there was “no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent” in the policy at issue. One of the accused had spent 530 days in jail before being cleared. The Enforcement Directorate, which drove much of the prosecution, has registered 193 cases against politicians over the last decade. The total number of convictions has been two, which is barely 1%. Now consider that the proportion of MPs who have declared pending criminal cases on their self-sworn affidavits has risen from 24% in 2004 to 46% in 2024. Among sitting MLAs across the country, 45% face criminal charges of which 29% face serious charges, including murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and crimes against women.
This criminalisation of politics is real, worsening, and corrosive to democratic life. This defines the central dilemma of the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025, currently before a Joint Parliamentary Committee. The Bill mandates the automatic cessation of ministerial office for PMs, CMs and Cabinet Ministers, if they are arrested and detained for 30 consecutive days on charges punishable by five years or more. The intention is to end governance from jail. The mechanism is, however, deeply flawed. Remember that a case pending in court is not a police FIR, not a noting in a history-sheeter’s file, not a complaint lodged by a political rival. Charges are framed only after a full investigation is complete, after a court has taken cognisance of the offence, and after a judge independently determines that a prima facie case exists. This involves the judicial application of mind.
An ordinary citizen with any such criminal blemish on their record cannot get government employment. And yet politicians across party lines routinely argue that all such cases against them are fabricated or politically motivated. How can this be even in the case of heinous offences such as rape, murder, kidnapping and extortion? The Bill’s problem is that it uses arrest, an executive action as the trigger for removal from office, rather than the framing of charges by a court. Investigative agencies can arrest and detain without a conviction or even a formal trial. Under the PMLA, bail conditions are near-insurmountable. Section 45 imposes twin conditions for release, and Section 24 reverses the burden of proof onto the accused. Under UAPA, the difficulty is even greater.
Securing bail within 30 days is near impossible. This creates a structural vulnerability that any government can exploit against its opponents. Arrest rival ministers and hold them under a bail-resistant law for 30 days, and evict, even before any court has examined the merits. The Bill contains no safeguard against such misuse. The 244th Law Commission Report had explicitly recommended that disqualification be triggered at the stage of the framing of charges by a competent court i.e. the first point at which genuine judicial scrutiny occurs. However, there is one counter-argument. The NCRB data reveal that conviction rates in Indian lower courts are, in many jurisdictions, alarmingly low.
In Pune’s lower judiciary, the conviction rate in 2023 was only 8.8%. If this pattern holds more widely, then any law that bars persons with pending court cases from public office would, in practice, be wrongly disqualifying the overwhelming majority who are innocent. This is not a trivial objection. It cuts to the heart of what a pending case actually signifies in the Indian judicial context. Does it reflect genuine criminality, or a broken system of prosecution and investigation? The answer quite often appears to be the latter. But the correct response to this paradox is not to abandon the project of keeping tainted candidates out of public life. It is to fix what is broken. Trials against sitting legislators must be fast-tracked as the Supreme Court directed in 2014 and again in 2017. The government’s power to withdraw cases against powerful politicians under Section 321 of the CrPC must be curbed. And investigative agencies must be held to genuine standards of evidence before courts, not used as instruments of pre-trial political pressure. The Bill also fails on its own stated logic. Re-appointment to ministerial office upon release from custody is expressly permitted under the proposed provisos to Articles 75(5A) and 164(4A).
A minister removed after 30 days in jail can return to the same post on bail while the identical charges remain pending. Nothing has changed except a brief interruption. The Bill applies only to ministers, leaving untouched the hundreds of MPs and MLAs with serious charges framed against them who continue to legislate and govern. And it does nothing to prevent tainted candidates from entering the electoral arena in the first place.
For over 25 years, the solutions have been documented and ignored. The Vohra Committee (1993), the 170th and 244th Law Commission Reports, the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution, and the SC in its 2018 judgment in Public Interest Foundation v. Union of India, all have urged Parliament to disqualify candidates at the stage of framing of charges by a competent court, for offences punishable by five years or more, in cases filed at least six months before the relevant election. Upon conviction for heinous crimes, the disqualification should be permanent. The ADR’s proposed reformulation of the 130th Amendment says that any Minister, PM, CM, MP or MLA against whom charges have been framed by a court for offences under Section 8(1), (2) and (3) of the Representation of the People Act, or for offences carrying a minimum five-year sentence, should be automatically relieved of their position. This is the judicial standard. This is what the Law Commission has repeatedly recommended. This is also what the SC, unable to act itself in 2018, expressly asked Parliament to do. A democracy cannot be held hostage either to the criminalisation of politics, or to laws that can be weaponised for political ends. The 130th Amendment, as drafted, risks being both ineffective against the first problem and dangerously enabling of the second.
The writer is a noted economist.
