Getting tense about one's past imperfect

India’s Election Commission (EC) takes a censorious view of transgressions, particularly in the midst of polling season, and can take stern action against those who, having allegedly flouted the law, fail to disclose the charges brought against them.

The risk of facing the EC’s ire has prompted a number of candidates in the upcoming Madhya Pradesh state elections to approach their local police stations to double-check how many criminal charges have been lodged against them so that they may report these to the poll authorities, without compounding their crimes with under-reporting.

Such delving into one’s own past peccadilloes might lend an entirely new interpretation to the term ‘history sheeters’, in that the annals of their putative misbehaviour are of such antiquity as to be lost track of, if follow-up research isn’t undertaken.


That such amnesia is not uncommon is attested to by the case of a former defence minister who, when asked why he had failed to file his tax returns for the past decade, candidly confessed that, thanks to his busy official schedule, he had ‘forgotten’ to do so. His plea was accepted without demurral, but in today’s surcharged political climate, such misremembrance of lapses is unlikely to be overlooked, leading to a spate of confessions made by those who would appear to be true to their convictions, in every sense.