Urban Naxal to Amit Shah, AAP Bharuch candidate tops the list of criminal cases in ADR Gujarat

The Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), a premier advocacy group, has refused to go beyond the data released by the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the Lok Sabha candidates’ self-declarations about their criminal records, educational qualifications and assets. has declared 35-year-old Aam Aadmi Party candidate Chaitar Vasava as the biggest criminal among those contesting the 26 seats in Gujarat.

Recently called ‘urban Naxal’ and ‘anti-tribal’ by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Chaitar, himself a tribal, is contesting the elections from Bharuch constituency with Congress support as part of the INDIA bloc. ADR’s list – based on ECI data – shows that he tops the list of 36 candidates against whom a criminal case is pending. Considered a promising candidate, popular among the tribals, Chaitar is pitted against the BJP’s Mansukh Vasava, a six-term Lok Sabha MP.

The Gujarat High Court, which was allegedly pressured to join the BJP, which he allegedly refused, and was jailed for a month in a riots case in December 2023, granted interim relief to Chaitar by suspending the bail condition order that prevented him from entering prison. Narmada district, part of which falls under Bharuch constituency, till June 12, the next date for hearing in the case. This allowed him to submit his candidacy. The sessions court had imposed the bail condition in January this year.

The ADR list, known for taking several cases to the Supreme Court for pushing through electoral reforms – the most recent of which involved the electoral bond scheme that thrust the elite nonprofit into the spotlight – shows that as many as twelve Criminal cases are pending against him, including cases related to theft, sexual harassment, extortion, causing serious harm, incitement to crimes punishable by death or life imprisonment, promoting enmity between different groups on the grounds religion, race, place of birth, place of residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony, and so on.

Answering a question whether ADR seeks to explore the political reasons why such criminal cases are being imposed by those in power on candidates like Chaitar, especially in light of the recent arrests by security agencies of top politicians, including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and former Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, NGO representative in Gujarat Pankti Jog said, “We are only analyzing the affidavits filed by individual candidates to analyze their criminal record. We have no means to analyze why these things are used against politicians.”

With some of the top Indian academics on the board, including Prof. Trilochan Sastry, Chairman of ADR, based at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad; Prof Jagdeep S Chhokar, Former Director, IIM-Ahmedabad; Dr. Ajit Ranade, Vice Chancellor, Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics, Pune; Dr. Kiran B Chhokar, head of the Higher Education Program at the Center for Environmental Education (CEE); Kamini Jaiswal, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court; Jaskirat Singh, Founder and CEO, Webrosoft Solutions (P) Ltd; and dr. Vipul Mudgal, director of Common Cause, another top elite NGO, which reportedly has 1,200 NGOs as members.

Chaitar Vasava, himself a tribal, is fighting elections from Bharuch constituency with Congress support as part of INDIA bloc

But ironically, ADR avoids making a comprehensive analysis of the netas’ antecedents, including their hate speech, which has been in national and international news lately and aims to foment religious division. It merely provides an ‘open data repository platform’ that claims to ‘provide Indian voters with election-related information’ about criminal, financial and educational information of candidates who have contested elections. Hatred and involvement in communal riots will be analyzed as a crime only when a case is registered against a candidate and not outside of it.

Although it recently won a major legal battle that forced the State Bank of India to release data on how many polls had been received in the form of electoral bonds and get them published with the Election Commission, it is not known whether ADR will take the matter further wants to treat. to ensure that political parties, especially the ruling BJP, do not use the money received as electoral bonds following raids or threats of raids by security forces on industrial houses. Answering a question, Jog, the ADR in-charge of Gujarat, told the media, “There remains confusion… We have not investigated the matter.”

Other lawsuits it has fought include requiring candidates running in elections to submit self-sworn statements about their criminal, financial and educational backgrounds; making the income tax returns of political parties available in the public domain; bring political parties under the Right to Information Act by declaring them public authorities; banning MPs and MLAs from holding office after being convicted by a court; have a separate button on the electronic voting machine (EVM) with the option None of the above (NOTA); and so forth.