When I opened the morning paper recently, I read about the price of an MLA – Rs 25 crore. I was not that surprised. It has often been mentioned that the price of an MP was about Rs 200 crore. Given that there are about 7 assembly constituents in a Lok Sabha constituency, the maths works out to be just about right.
In fact, a story I heard recently was that a set of people said that with a budget of Rs 10,000 crore, one could rule over India. Buy out 50 MPs at Rs 200 crore apiece. If one of the small political parties that are part of the UPA can exercise so much power on the government with less than 20 MPs, imagine what one could do by controlling 50 MPs in government.
(There is another way to look at this: if we can get 50 good people into Parliament in the next elections, imagine what we can do for the country’s policies. This is where United Voters of India comes in.)
