The rules laid out in the Representation of the People Act of 1951 state that persons convicted of a criminal offence for 2 years or more shall lose their seat, and be disqualified from contesting elections till 6 years after release. As one might expect, this has led to a very low conviction rate for members of Parliament. In several instances, charges related to serious crimes such as assault, murder, rioting, kidnapping, etc, have been pending in the courts.

Jharkhand at 53.9% and Maharashtra at 52.1% are states with the highest proportion of elected MPs with pending criminal cases .

Two out of thirty-two cabinet ministers , Girija Vyas (INC) and Harish Rawat (INC), have been implicated in criminal cases .

i.e., none of the 4 MPs in the Communist Party of India have cases pending — the lowest for any political party

or 9 out of 11 MPs in the Shiv Sena have cases pending — the highest for a party with more than two elected MPs

is the highest no. of pending cases for a Lok Sabha MP (Kameshwar Baitha (JMM) from Jharkhand)

Of the ten political parties with the most elected members in the Lok Sabha, All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) has the least number of MPs with cases pending .

or more than 150 of the current Lok Sabha members have been accused of a criminal offence .

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Data regarding the criminal records of the 15th Lok Sabha members was obtained from the Association for Democratic Reforms on Oct 1, 2013:

http://myneta.info/ls2009/index.php?action=show_winners&sort=default

This data had been compiled by the ADR immediately after the 2009 elections, and has not been updated since. For the purposes of this post, we updated the data to remove members that are no longer in the Lok Sabha, and it was assumed that new members elected through bye-elections have no criminal records. Feel free to look at our modified data: lok-sabha-criminal-records.xls

The map of India seen here is a derivative of the map of India on Wikimedia Commons:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:India-locator-map-blank.svg