India's lawmakers ganged up Monday to shoot down a move by the country's Election Commission to make it compulsory for candidates contesting elections at the state and central legislatures to disclose their incomes, bank accounts, personal profiles and any criminal history.

However, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was joined by the main opposition Congress party and smaller regional parties cutting across the political spectrum in agreement that government should urgently legislate to ensure probity in public life.

Only on Friday, a court sentenced Sukh Ram, telecommunications minister in a Congress party government that ruled between 1991 and 1996, to three years rigorous imprisonment for causing massive losses to his ministry by favouring a particular company in the award of telecommunications contracts.

Sukh Ram always maintained that vast sums of unaccounted for currency seized from his official residence by police were funds that belonged to the Congress party. But the party expelled Sukh Ram, who went on to form the regional Himachal Vikas Congress, which became an ally in the BJP-led coalition that rules India's central government.

Judge V K Jain reflected the mood of the country when he observed: ''A message needs to be put across that howsoever high and mighty a person may be, no one is mightier than the law, and if a public servant indulges in corruption, the punishment should be severe enough make him regret the moment he decided to eat the forbidden fruit.''

Overstepping limits

In May, India's Supreme Court ruling that candidates contesting provincial and parliamentary polls must disclose their wealth and police records was greeted by anger by politicians, who said that the judiciary was overstepping its limits.

The court directed the Election Commission, a constitutional body, to frame rules that would compel candidates to disclose histories of criminal cases, assets, liabilities and educational qualifications.

''We fail to understand why the right of a citizen or voter  ''I felt at the meeting that we must have a law (to clean up politics) but that I should not be left to the directives of the judiciary or any other constitutional authority.''

Suitable legislative changes

Mukherjee asserted that it was for Parliament to bring about suitable legislative changes and that no other Constitutional authority could usurp this right.

But the record shows that in spite of an alarming increase in the number of people with criminal records entering Parliament and the state legislatures, political parties have so far shied away from legislation that could potentially debar many of their winning candidates.

In an address to the nation two years ago, President K R Narayanan spoke of a growing nexus between criminals, politicians and important people in society. ''At every social and political level, there is a crying need to speak out against crime and violence of all kinds. But even such rhetoric is absent,'' he chided.

According to the Central Vigilance Commissioner N Vittal, corruption in India is rooted in the political system in which every political party needs to raise large amounts of money but must depend on unaccountable sources for them.

''Without transparency in the fund-raising process, corrupt money begets corrupt political actions,'' said Vittal, whose office was created to tackle corruption within the powerful bureaucracy.

According to Vittal, where political parties before India's independencefrom colonial rule in 1947 collected funds openly and disclosed their sources, restrictions on funding imposed in the 60s led to underhand funding using ''black money'' or unaccounted money.

Black money

''Today the vast majority of political funds in India comes in the form of black money which is not regulated by the state and most likely gained through earlier corrupt deals at the state's expense,'' Vittal said.

Vittal thinks that it is essential to change election rules so that ''candidates against whom serious criminal charges have been brought are prohibited from contesting the elections until their names are cleared in a court of law''.

But political leaders say that long delays at the overburdened courts while candidates wait to clear their names presented were a serious problem and could certainly lead to misuses of authority and victimisation.

At the moment, legal delays actually work to the advantage of real criminals who are not disqualified from contesting until actually convicted. Actual convictions, such as that of Sukh Ram, who sued a British journalist who wrote that he dealt on ''suitcase by suitcase rather than case by case basis'' and collected damages from his paper, are rare.

In the 90s, intelligence officials investigating the funding channels of "jihadist" groups operating in Kashmir but suspected to be funded by Pakistan's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) through unofficial money transfers ("hawala") stumbled on a list of top politicians and bureaucrats who were using the same channels.

UNDP report for South Asia

According to the United Nations Development Project Report for South Asia in 1999, if corruption levels in India could be brought to down to levels of those in Scandinavian countries, the country's GDP would automatically jump by 1.5 percent and foreign direct investment would grow by 12 percent.

Several estimates have placed the size of the black market or underground economy at 45 percent of all economic activity and say it threatens to overtake the formal economy.

Ashwini Kumar, spokesman for the Congress party and lawyer, says that even if the Election Commission's rules were accepted, it would still notbe possible to tackle the problem of unaccounted money used to fight elections, or to prevent candidates from paying criminal elements to do their dirty work for them. — IPS