India, Feb. 15 -- The Supreme Court has held the mirror to political parties many times in a bid to decriminalise our legislature but every election just compounds the problem with them showing no serious intent to comply. So the number of MPs with criminal cases pending against them has gone up from 24 per cent in 2004 to 43 per cent in 2019. This despite its ruling of September 2018, when a five-judge Constitution Bench had held that all candidates would have to declare their criminal antecedents to the Election Commission (EC) before contesting polls and had called for a wider publicity of their records, through print and electronic media. It had even asked Parliament to formulate a law to ensure that criminals are disbarred so that th...