Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who opposed a government decree that aimed to shield tainted parliamentarians, has roped in former chief election commissioners to ensure no leader with criminal antecedents get a party ticket for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Going ahead with his plans to clean up the party, Gandhi has entrusted the responsibility of conducting background check of an applicant, if there is a doubt over his or her criminal past, on the Foundation for Advanced Management of Elections (FAME) - an NGO set up by former chief election commissioner J. M. Lyngdoh.

Former CECs T.S. Krishnamurthy, N.Gopalaswami and S.Y. Quraishi are also part of FAME.

According to Lyngdoh, FAME will examine the background of Lok Sabha probables if the party asks it to do so. "If the party has any doubt about a candidate, we will check his or her background and advise the party leadership accordingly," Lyngdoh told Mail Today.

He said the NGO was capable of doing the job for all the Lok Sabha candidates of the Congress if needed. "That won't be a problem. We can do it all for all the candidates," he said.

After Rahul was made a Congress general secretary in 2007 and given the charge of party's youth wings - Indian Youth Congress and National Students Union of India (NSUI) - FAME has been conducting polls to appoint office-bearers in the two youth outfits.

"We have been conducting polls for the Youth Congress and the NSUI. It brings up legitimate winners as the process is fair," said Lyngdoh.

According to FAME, the process of background check in YC and NSUI helped prevent several candidates, who were found violating the guidelines set up by Rahul, from taking up the leadership role.

"The process was successful in YC and NSUI. We could weed out several undesirable applicants," general secretary of FAME K.J. Rao - a former advisor to the Election Commission - told Mail Today.

Since he became the Congress vice president, Rahul has been trying to introduce new systems to change the 128-year-old party. One of them is an elaborate process to pick party candidates for the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls, in which feedback from local leaders is taken into account.

Also, he has started a pilot project in 16 Lok Sabha constituencies across the country, where party workers, leaders and residents would get a chance to vote who should be their nominee for the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Fame is not playing a role in this experiment, which is dubbed as "primaries" on the lines of the US polls.

In September 2013, the government was forced to withdraw a Bill and an ordinance that aimed to shield convicted MPs, after Rahul publicly rebuked it.

"It (ordinance) is a complete nonsense and should be torn up and thrown away," the Congress vice president had said.

The ordinance had been cleared by the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and had the support of top Congress leaders.

