Some facts about the elected MPs of Bengal


It is now fairly clear that newspapers and other media outlets seem to be all so biased that it is difficult to give credence to their stories. They may not always be factually wrong, but the omissions and additions are always symptomatic of the political persuasions of the outlet concerned. I think that in such circumstances, it is best to try to make time to analyse the information that is, fortunately, fairly easily available  and try to make sense of it ourselves. I have decided that this is what I am going to do and I am sharing some information which is easily accessible in the internet which is quite interesting. I future times, I hope to make more nuanced analyses of the data that is out there.
I thought that I would like to try and see the quality of the MPs that we elected in the least election held earlier this year. As we know, the TMC ( Trinamool Congress)  won 22, the BJP ( Bharatiya Janata Party) 18 and the INC ( Indian National Congress)  2 seats making up a total of 42 seats in the Lok Sabha from Bengal.
I looked at 3 criteria to judge the quality of these MPs. These are their educational qualifications, their assets and the number of criminal cases that have been filed against them. I chose these parameters because this information is fairly easily available and I did not have to spend much time doing a lot of research. As I said, in the future, I hope to do a more detailed job bringing out more information.
Let us look at the educational qualifications first.
If we look at the MPs as a whole the picture is like this:

Qualification
Doctorates
Postgraduates
Professional Graduates
Graduates
12th pass
10th pass
8th pass
No
2
6
10
14
4
3
3
%
4.7
14.4
23.8
33.3
9.4
7.2
7.2

The INC and the BJP have a doctorate each, the 8th pass are shared 2 in the BJP and one in the TMC. Fully 57 % are graduates of whom 10 have professional qualifications. There are some anomalies, for instance, the BJP State president has been shown to be 10 pass, but he has vocational education qualifications from a polytechnic institution. However this does not seem to count in the websites that I consulted. 3 MPs have not even passed the Matric, and the Leader of the INC Opposition in the Lok Sabha is a class 10 pass.
Overall, not as bad as I had feared. Only 6 MPs have not passed high school (around 14%).

Now let us look at the assets of the MPs. I think these are based on their self declarations and may then perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. But that is all the data I had to work with so here goes:

Asset more than 10 crores
Assets between 1 and 10 crores
Assets less than 1 crore
6 ( Cong 2, BJP 1, TMC 3)
27( TMC 19, BJP 8)
9( TMC 2, BJP 7)

 Both the Congress MPs have more than 10 crores in assets. Of them Abu Hasem Khan Chowdhury probably has khandani assets, but the Robin Hood of Baharampur also has assets of more than 11 crores. Most MPs fall into the 1-10 crore class but 9 have less than a crore, of whom 7 are BJP MPs.
The richest of them all is Khalilur Rehman ,elected from Jangipur on a TMC ticket who is a Bidi king and owns almost 37 crores of assets. The poorest is Asit Mal ( TMC) from Bolpur with about 13 lakh worth of assets.

The last criteria that I have checked is the number of criminal cases against them.

No criminal cases
1 criminal case
2-5 criminal cases
5-10 criminal cases
More than 10 criminal cases
19 ( BJP 5, TMC 13, INC 1)
6( BJP 2, TMC 4)
9 (BJP 5,TMC4)
4( BJP 3, INC 1)
4 ( all BJP)

The champion is Arjun Singh of  the BJP with 24 cases filed against him. In fact all the MPs who have more than 10 cases filed are from the BJP. Whether this shows that there are more MPs of criminal tendencies in the BJP or demonstrates the bias of the police towards the local ruling party I leave you to judge. But even so, I was pretty pleasantly surprised to find that almost half the MPs have an unsullied record.

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