More than half of the candidates who had contested the State Assembly elections from 1957 to 2011 had helped to swell the State coffers, by losing their security deposits.
According to the data available with the Chief Electoral Officer, 58.97 per cent of all candidates lost their deposits since the elections held in 1957. Of the 9,971 total contestants, 5,880 forfeited their deposits.
“On an average, two candidates in a constituency used to lose their deposit in each election. The peak was in the 1987 election, when 964 candidates out of 1,254 lost their deposit,” said J. Prabhash, Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Kerala University.
The Election Commission of India rules say that if a candidate fails to get a minimum of one-sixth of the total valid votes polled, the deposit goes to the treasury.
Among the three major political formations, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) saw the largest number of its candidates losing their deposits, since 1957. Down the years, 860 of the BJP candidates could not save their deposits while the Congress stood second, logging 24. Ten candidates of the CPI(M) forfeited their deposits. Expectably, independent candidates were the greatest losers, with 4,085 of them forfeiting their deposits since the 1957 election.
Prof. Prabhash, who had analysed the data extensively, pointed out that the main political parties are in a much stronger position in recent times as none of their candidates had lost their deposits since 1991.
“The last time the CPI(M) suffered a setback in this respect was in the 1970 election. For the Congress, this was in 1982,” he said.
A gender-wise account showed that the number of instances in which men lost deposit was 59 per cent compared to 57.6 per cent for women. The CPI(M) and CPI never had an instance of their women candidates losing the security deposit. The Congress had one instance, where a candidate who contested the 1965 election, lost her security deposit.
