What the Candidate Affidavits Actually Show About Crime and Indian Politics

Every candidate contesting an Indian election is required, since a Supreme Court order in the Association for Democratic Reforms case of 2002, to file a sworn affidavit disclosing pending criminal cases, assets, and educational qualifications. Two decades of this disclosure requirement have produced a large, granular dataset, analysed most systematically by the Association for Democratic Reforms and its affiliated Election Watch network, and the trend line in that data is not encouraging. The proportion of sitting members of Parliament facing criminal charges, including charges the law classifies as serious, involving offences that carry sentences of five years or more, has risen across successive Lok Sabha elections rather than falling, despite the disclosure requirement, despite repeated Supreme Court directions, and despite public commentary on the issue in nearly every election cycle since the affidavits became mandatory.

What the Numbers Actually Say

According to Association for Democratic Reforms analysis of affidavits filed for recent Lok Sabha elections, a substantial share of sitting MPs, well over a third in the most recent Parliament, have declared pending criminal cases against themselves, and a meaningful proportion of these involve serious charges rather than minor or procedural offences. This is not confined to one party or one region; parties across the political spectrum have fielded candidates with pending serious criminal cases in proportions that track closely with each party's overall seat count, suggesting the phenomenon reflects a system-wide incentive structure rather than the particular culture of any single organisation.

Winnability as the Organising Logic

The uncomfortable explanation that election data analysts converge on is that candidates with a criminal record, particularly one built on local reputation for getting things done through means the law does not sanction, are often more winnable than cleaner alternatives, especially in constituencies where state capacity to deliver basic services or enforce contracts is weak and a strongman reputation substitutes for functioning institutions. Political parties, whose primary short-term objective in fielding any candidate is to win the seat, have consistently prioritised this winnability calculation over internal vetting, and in a first-past-the-post system where a party's national fortunes depend on aggregating many such individual seat-level victories, the incentive to overlook a criminal record when the candidate can win is difficult to dislodge through moral appeals alone.

The Money Connection

Campaign finance realities compound this dynamic. Indian elections, particularly at the state assembly level, have become extremely expensive to contest, and candidates who can self-fund a campaign, sometimes through wealth accumulated via the same activities that generated their criminal cases, offer parties a lower financial burden than candidates who would need central party funding. The electoral bond scheme, introduced in 2018 and struck down by the Supreme Court in February 2024 for violating voters' right to information about political funding, added a further layer of opacity to the broader financing ecosystem within which candidate selection occurs, making it harder for voters and researchers alike to trace the full financial relationships shaping who gets nominated.

The Judiciary's Repeated but Limited Interventions

The Supreme Court has intervened repeatedly on this question, directing in 2018 that parties publish the criminal records of their candidates prominently in newspapers and on their websites, and later, in 2020, that parties explain in writing why they chose to field a candidate with pending criminal cases over one without. Compliance with these directions has been inconsistent, and the explanations parties do publish are often perfunctory, citing the candidate's "popularity" or "winnability" without engaging with the substance of the charges. The Court has been candid in its own judgments that it cannot bar candidates with pending, unproven charges from contesting, since that would violate the presumption of innocence, which leaves Parliament as the only body that could legislate a firmer bar, and Parliament, dominated by the very political parties whose nomination practices are in question, has shown little appetite for doing so.

A Fair Complication

It is worth taking seriously the objection that pending criminal cases are not the same as convictions, and that India's criminal justice system is itself frequently used, including by political rivals and by state machinery, to file cases against opposition politicians and activists for reasons having little to do with genuine wrongdoing. Some proportion of the affidavit data undoubtedly reflects politically motivated prosecution rather than genuine criminality, and any reform that used pending charges alone as a disqualifying criterion would risk handing incumbents a tool to bar inconvenient challengers by having cases filed against them before an election. This complication is real, though it also cuts toward reforms other than a blanket disqualification, faster trial timelines for cases involving sitting legislators, for instance, which the Supreme Court has separately pushed for.

Living With an Unresolved Problem

The affidavit disclosure regime has done exactly what disclosure requirements are meant to do: it has made the information available in granular, verifiable form. What it has not done is change the underlying incentives that lead parties to field these candidates in the first place, because disclosure changes what voters can know without changing what determines how they vote, and it does nothing to alter parties' financial and organisational incentives to prioritise winnability above nearly every other consideration. Two decades of transparency have produced a well-documented problem rather than a shrinking one, which is itself a useful, if sobering, lesson about the limits of transparency as a reform tool when it is not paired with changes to the deeper incentive structure it exposes.