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.
Comments