M A I N   N E W S

RS seats for Rs 100 cr, says Haryana MP Birender; retracts
Tribune News Service

My version was simple that there is a trend of a new political class. More and more people with money power were entering the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. I had given figures from a newspaper. — Choudhary Birender Singh, Haryana RS MP

New Delhi, July 29
The Congress today distanced itself from the remarks of its Rajya Sabha MP from Haryana Choudhary Birender Singh who said at a rally in Jind yesterday that Rajya Sabha seats were available for Rs 100 crore.

Birender Singh, a known detractor of Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, was quick to retract his statement in the evening saying the media had grossly distorted his remarks and that he had only referred to the growing influence of money power in elections.

“My version was simple that there is a trend of a new political class. More and more people with money power were entering the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. I had given figures from a newspaper.

“I had said that after the Lok Sabha results of 2009, certain figures were given in a newspaper report that 360 among the winning LS candidates were ‘crorepatis’ and a dozen and a half were billionaries (arabpatis),” Birender said later in a feeble attempt to mask his earlier statement.

He had been caught on camera saying, “Once someone told me that he had a budget of Rs 100 crore to become a Rajya Sabha MP. But when he calculated the expenditure later, he found it was Rs 80 crore.

He ended up saving Rs 20 crore. Just tell me, will a person who can shell out Rs 100 crore for an Rajya Sabha seat think about a poor man?”

While the BJP was quick to slam Birender Singh’s remarks saying he had taken the level of political discourse to a new low, BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar added, “In the Congress, seats must be up for sale because they have a culture of fixing deals.”

When contacted for a version of what the Congress thought about Birender Singh’s statement, Ajay Makan, the party’s communication department chief, said, “Now that he has retracted, we have no comments on the issue.”

While clarifying on his remarks, Birinder Singh said that his intention was simply to point out that if people with money enter politics, they would not take the demands of the poor seriously and will, in fact, silence their voices.

What Birinder said was reflected in the statistics on the use of money power in politics that the electoral reforms NGO - Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) - dished out today on the occasion of their 10 years of relentless pursuit of clean politics.

Known for their in-depth analysis of candidates’ criminal and financial history, ADR’s analysis of 10 years reveals that the average assets of candidates who have contested elections since 2004 were Rs 1.37 crore. As many as 62847 candidates were analysed. The ADR stated today that since 2004, the average assets of MPs and MLAs (8,790 winning candidates analysed) stood at Rs 3.83 crore.