Parties shut out Scheduled Caste candidates from general seats
May 03, 2014  09:43

When the Constitution was being framed, an advisory committee determined that members of communities for whom there would be reserved constituencies would not be debarred from contesting "unreserved' constituencies.

 

Yet today, political parties are not following the spirit of the Constitution, The Hindu's analysis of data shows. In both 2004 and 2009, the country's two biggest political parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, gave tickets to only three Scheduled Caste (SC) candidates between them to contest from 'general' seats, The Hindu found.

 

This means that the two parties gave less than 1% of their tickets in 'general' seats to SC candidates. Information on the castes of all candidates is available from the Election Commission of India for 2009 and 2004 only.

 

While only SCs can contest the 84 seats reserved for them and Scheduled Tribes (STs) the 47 seats reserved for them as of 2009, there is no bar on who can contest the 412 'general' seats in the country. "The original intent was absolutely not to ghettoise SCs into reserved constituencies only, as most political parties have done,' Badri Narayan, professor at the G B Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, and a social scientist and expert on Dalit issues, said.

 

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