Breaking: Candidates contesting elections have to declare their source of income, Supreme Court

The Supreme Court today ordered that candidates contesting elections will have to declare their source of income, as well as that of spouses and dependents..The judgment was delivered by a Bench of Justices Jasti Chelameswar and S Abdul Nazeer in a petition filed by NGO Lok Prahari..The Court in its judgment held,.“In the light of the law declared by this Court in ADR case and PUCL case, we do not see any legal or normative impediment nor has any tenable legal objection been raised before us by any one of the respondents, for issuance of the direction relating to the changes in FORM 26 (declaration by the CANDIDATES)….Therefore, we are of the opinion the prayer 1(1) should be granted and is accordingly granted. We direct that Rule 4A of the RULES and Form 26 appended to the RULES shall be suitably amended, requiring CANDIDATES and their ASSOCIATES to declare their sources of income.”.Lok Prahari, in its petition, had submitted that the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1951 mandated declaration of assets by candidates contesting elections, but not the source of the assets/income..The petitioner organization had cited Section 9A of the Act to buttress its case. As per Section 9A, candidates having business contracts with the government would be disqualified. It was the petitioner’s case that Section 9A was a diluted version of Section 7D, which had provided for disqualification of candidates for having any business interest, either directly or through close family members, in any organisation holding government contracts..The petitioner NGO had, therefore, contended that the earlier Section ought to be brought back to the statute, and that an interim direction be issued that candidates must declare such connections in their election affidavits..The Court in its judgment considered various other prayers made by the petitioner. The Bench, however, deemed it unfit to grant the prayers seeking an amendment to the RP Act, stating that such a matter was exclusively within the domain of the Parliament..The Bench also issued a direction for the establishment of a permanent mechanism to inquire/investigate into the disproportionate increase in the assets of MPs and MLAs during their tenure as legislators, while adding,.“…data so collected by the said mechanism, along with the analysis and recommendation, if any, as noted above should be placed in the public domain to enable the voters of such LEGISLATOR to take an informed and appropriate decision, if such LEGISLATOR chooses to contest any election for any legislative body in future.”.However, the Court declined to order an investigation into the assets of legislators listed in an annexure filed with the petition, holding,.“We are of the opinion that an inquiry/investigation such as the one sought for by the petitioner with reference to the named LEGISLATORS would amount to selective scrutiny of the matter in the absence of any permanent mechanism regularly monitoring the growth of the assets of all the LEGISLATORS and/or their ASSOCIATES as a class. Such a selective investigation could lead to political witch-hunting.”.Another prayer allowed was the declaration that non-disclosure of assets and sources of income would amount to ‘undue influence’ – a corrupt practice under Section 123(2) of the RP Act of 1951. It was observed that the same had already been observed in a 2015 Supreme Court judgment in Krishnamoorthy v. Sivakumar & Others..The Court also allowed the prayer seeking information on the contracts entered into by candidates or their spouses/dependents, with the appropriate government, noting that the same was “certainly relevant information in the context of disqualification on the ground of undue accretion of assets”..Read the judgment below.