I still remember an answer-writing session years ago where I got a GS-2 question on electoral reform and realised, mid-sentence, that I couldn’t actually say how many sitting MPs and MLAs in my own state had criminal cases pending against them. Today’s data on India’s Special MP/MLA Courts explains exactly why that gap in awareness is so easy to carry — because the system tracking it has itself been quietly drowning for years.
What actually happened
An amicus curiae report placed before the Supreme Court in the ongoing Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. Union of India matter shows that criminal cases pending against sitting and former MPs and MLAs have risen from 4,075 in 2018 to 4,266 by July 2026 — this despite the Court’s own December 2017 order that created dedicated Special Courts to fast-track exactly these trials. Twelve such courts now operate across ten states and Union Territories. Of the pending cases, 401 involve sitting Members of Parliament and 1,393 involve sitting MLAs, while 14 state Chief Ministers also face pending matters. Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for 1,220 cases, the highest of any state, followed by Kerala, Bihar, Maharashtra and Odisha. In 2025, these Special Courts disposed of 1,454 cases — a genuine effort — but 1,234 fresh cases were filed in the same period, so the net backlog barely moved. As of today, 1,838 cases have been pending for more than five years, and 746 for over a decade.
Political/Governance Dimension
This is a governance failure at both ends of the political process. At the entry point, parties across the spectrum continue to field candidates with declared criminal cases because winnability still trumps character in ticket distribution — despite the Election Commission mandating disclosure of criminal antecedents in Form 26 and in newspaper and social media notices under the 2020 Supreme Court directions. At the exit point, once elected, an MP or MLA facing charges can often use the weight of political office to slow the very trial meant to hold them accountable — through adjournment requests, transfer petitions, or simply the leverage that comes with incumbency. As we discussed in our piece on SIR Phase 3 and India’s shrinking voter rolls, the health of India’s electoral ecosystem depends as much on who gets to vote as on who is allowed to stand — and this data suggests the second filter is barely functioning.
Constitutional/Legal Dimension
The Supreme Court’s continuing mandamus in this space goes back further than the 2017 order. In Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2013), the Court struck down Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which had allowed convicted legislators to keep their seats while an appeal was pending — a ruling that closed one loophole but did nothing to speed up the trials themselves. Public Interest Foundation v. Union of India (2018) went further, directing mandatory publication of a candidate’s criminal history, but again stopped short of fast disposal. The pattern across a decade of jurisprudence is consistent: the Court keeps tightening disclosure and disqualification-on-conviction, while the actual machinery of trial — police investigation, prosecution, and now these Special Courts — remains under-resourced. It is the same underlying capacity constraint we flagged in our piece on raising the judicial retirement age to 62: India does not have the sanctioned judicial strength to clear even routine backlogs, let alone politically sensitive cases where the accused frequently has both the means and the motive to delay.
Ethical Dimension
There’s a genuine ethical tension buried in this data that a purely legal reading misses. On one side is the public’s legitimate interest in representatives of reasonable character — probity in public life is not a decorative ideal, it shapes whether citizens trust the institutions that govern them. On the other side is the presumption of innocence, a foundational principle that a pending FIR is an allegation, not a finding of guilt. Treating “4,266 cases pending” as though it means “4,266 criminals in office” collapses that distinction, and it’s a collapse that gets exploited both by those demanding blanket disqualification and by those dismissing every case as political vendetta. The honest ethical position sits uncomfortably in between: the volume of pending cases is a real problem, but the solution has to preserve due process rather than shortcut around it.
Where I’d push back
I’d resist the neat narrative that “politics in India is criminalised, therefore disqualify anyone with a pending case.” A meaningful share of cases against opposition politicians are tied to protests, defamation complaints, or public-order charges filed by state machinery that a ruling party controls — which means pre-conviction disqualification, a demand some retired judges and civil society groups have pushed for, could just as easily become a tool for selective prosecution of political rivals as a genuine anti-corruption measure. Uttar Pradesh’s outsized share of 1,220 cases probably reflects its scale, its intensely contested multi-party electoral politics, and an aggressive FIR culture as much as it reflects any unique criminality among its legislators — comparing raw counts across states without normalising for population or number of seats risks a misleading headline. And frankly, twelve Special Courts trying to process over four thousand cases nationally was never going to keep pace with new filings; the disposal-versus-filing numbers from 2025 make that arithmetic obvious. Expanding capacity may matter more than any new disqualification rule.
Way forward
The most defensible reform path separates process reform from punishment reform. On process: the Supreme Court could set an outer time limit for framing charges and completing trial in MP/MLA cases, modelled on the day-to-day hearing mandate that exists for POCSO courts, backed by mandatory quarterly disposal reporting to the Court’s registry so that laggard states face visible accountability. Special Court capacity needs to be allocated in proportion to actual caseload rather than a flat number per state — Uttar Pradesh’s 1,220 pending cases against a handful of courts is simply not a workable ratio. Video-conferencing and digitised case management can cut the adjournment culture that lets well-resourced accused persons stall proceedings for years. On punishment, reform should stay anchored to conviction rather than allegation — but a genuine ethics push from parties themselves, transparently declining tickets to candidates with serious pending charges rather than waiting for courts or the ECI to force the issue, would do more for public trust than any single legal fix.
If you’re working through Polity and Governance for your Mains answers and want a second pair of eyes on how to structure a question like this one, book a free WhatsApp mentorship consultation with us — no strings attached.