A quarter of all Bharatiya Janata Party candidates and nearly a third of all Congress candidates in the Gujarat Assembly elections face criminal cases, an analysis of data released by the Association for Democratic Reforms showed.
The non-profit outfit analysed election affidavits of 1,745 candidates, separately for Phase 1 (released on Monday) and Phase 2 (released on Wednesday). It did not analyse 83 candidates because of reasons such as unavailable data or badly-scanned affidavits.
Thirty-three constituencies were classified as “red alert” as three or more of its candidates face criminal cases. As many as 238 candidates are facing cases with more than half of them – 142 – accused of serious charges.
The share of candidates with serious criminal cases was 13.1% for the BJP and 21.8% for the Congress. The Bahujan Samaj Party had 12.7% of its candidates with criminal cases. Serious criminal cases refer to murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and crimes against women.
In terms of wealth, 255 candidates were found to have declared assets worth Rs 2 crore or more, ADR’s reports showed. About 22.7% candidates own assets worth more than Rs 1 crore.
Gujarat will go to polls in the coming days, with 89 constituencies set to vote on Saturday and the remaining 93 on December 14. Results will be declared on December 18.
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