Eventually, Gawli was put behind bars for his misdeeds. When the police came to Dagdi Chawl to arrest him, Gawli was hiding inside the drawer of a bed, gun in hand.7 While in jail in the late 1990s, Gawli and the Shiv Sena abruptly parted ways. As to why, rumors of all sorts made the rounds: that Gawli had ordered the murder of several Shiv Sena lawmakers, including a godson of Bal Thackeray’s; that Thackeray grew wary of Gawli’s rising prominence; and that Daddy had outgrown his existence as a mere hired gun in the employ of overbearing political masters.8
For decades (if not longer), mafia groups in Mumbai had maintained links to politics, although the biggest dons typically chose to live on the periphery of the electoral spotlight rather than on its center stage. After severing ties with the Shiv Sena, Gawli broke with tradition and floated the ABS as his personal vehicle for seizing political power. The party’s ideology was unclear; its primary objectives seemed to be to counter the Shiv Sena while providing Gawli a means to promote his personal interests. Explaining his foray into politics, Gawli stated that he was only doing “what the public demanded” and that, like any good servant of the people, he “had no choice but to bow to their desire.”9 In a more honest moment, Gawli would admit to a more selfish motivation: protection. “I am not afraid of any rival,” he once remarked to a journalist. “My only fear is that the police may get me.”10 Having decided to join active politics, Gawli quickly mimicked the Sena’s modus operandi of setting up a network of shakhas (branches), often directly adjacent to the Sena’s own operations, from which he and his party-mates could dispense social services and burnish their credentials as selfless Robin Hoods.11
After a series of frustrating failures in local elections, Gawli managed to get his eldest daughter, Geeta, elected to the Mumbai municipal corporation in 2002. He finally hit pay dirt himself when he won election to the Maharashtra state assembly in 2004, representing urban Chinchpokli. Gawli’s wife, Asha, was his campaign manager and effectively represented her husband’s constituency in his stead; he spent much of his term in jail on murder charges.12 “Violence and non-violence have their own place in society,” Gawli once remarked. “It all depends on the situation.”13
Gawli’s political rags-to-riches story reads more like a screenplay for a summer Bollywood blockbuster than the bio-sheet of a rising politician.14 Yet within just a few years, Gawli successfully completed a surprising transition from gangster hired by politicians, who was booked in more than three dozen criminal cases involving murder and extortion, to a political player in his own right. In making this leap, Gawli was far from alone. One government commission after another convened over the past few decades has lamented the well-trodden career transition from lawbreaker to lawmaker; a 2002 government of India white paper noted that it was a “disgrace” that “several hardened criminals who may have many cases of murder, rape and dacoity against them are actually occupying the seats” in Parliament and the various state assemblies.15
What explains the sudden change of heart experienced by Gawli and others like him who traded on their criminal reputations to run for political office? Why did criminals with lengthy rap sheets, who were once content to contract with political parties but remain squarely in the background, take the plunge and enter the political foreground?
WHERE DO CRIMINAL POLITICIANS COME FROM?
Throughout this book, I conceive of electoral politics as functioning as a marketplace for politicians. As with any market of any type, there are both supply and demand factors at work. Politicians, much like firms, wish to “supply” their wares to voters, the consumers who have some “demand” for the goods and services politicians are offering.
Though the analogy is imperfect, the market metaphor serves as a useful framing device to understand why the appeal of politicians linked to criminality endures. But before getting to what motivates demand on the part of voters for candidates linked with crime, it is important to explore why individuals associated with crime choose to take the electoral plunge in the first place.
Many analysts of contemporary India treat the association of criminals and politics as a new phenomenon. In actuality, individuals tied to criminal activity have been active in Indian politics from the early days of the republic. Indeed, the historical record is replete with evidence of politicians using “antisocial” or “lumpen” elements in the earliest elections following independence. At some point, however, the power dynamic seems to have shifted; criminals decided to run for office themselves. Therefore, what is new is the precise nature of the connection between criminals and politics.
Surprisingly, social scientists have not, by and large, grappled with the puzzle of the entry of criminals into politics. Instead, many existing analyses of the cozy links that developed between criminals and politics in India have a “black box” quality to them; a certain configuration went into the black box of Indira Gandhi’s tenure in the 1970s and out of the other end emerged a new arrangement where criminals appeared ascendant in the electoral domain.16
A closer examination suggests there were two sets of factors responsible for injecting a supply of criminals into electoral politics at this precise stage of India’s history: “pull” factors, or structural forces that created a certain enabling environment, and “push” factors, or the immediate influences on the behavior of criminals. To the extent scholars have focused on the evolving nexus of crime and politics in contemporary India, their explanations have largely centered on pull factors. These factors range from the breakdown of the Congress Party’s ossified patronage networks, to rising, unmet social demands often expressed through the prism of caste or identity politics, and to the hollowing out of public sector institutions, or what one scholar has called a “crisis of governability.”17
All of these explanations have merit. Large structural changes in the political system did in fact open up political space for individuals of dubious repute to take up a starring role in electoral politics in the absence of effective mediating institutions. One crucial pull factor many scholars have missed—or, at the very least, underemphasized—is the collapse of India’s election finance regime.
However, these accounts gloss over the precise motivations that pushed criminals, once content to live on the fringes of electoral politics, to stand for elections directly. Drawing on the marketplace analogy, I argue that one way of understanding the rise of criminals in India’s politics is to conceptualize them as behaving like private firms seeking to “vertically integrate” their operations.
Two caveats before I proceed: throughout the chapter, I cite statistics (largely drawn from reports published by the ECI) on electoral incidents involving breaches of law and order, violence, or malpractice as proxies for the spread of criminality in politics. Strictly speaking, these are analytically separate concepts. But because there is a dearth of detailed data on the personal characteristics of India’s politicians before the mid-2000s, these data are immensely useful. However, the reporting of incidents is often impressionistic and should be taken as illustrative of a blossoming nexus between crime and politics.
In addition, the data on electoral incidents, while deeply troubling, must also be seen within the proper context. On the one hand, the rising tide of electoral violence and allegations of fraud represents a debasement of the democratic process. Such occurrences raise questions about how “free and fair” elections in India have been in the decades since independence. On the other hand, when viewed in the context of India’s gargantuan elections, these incidents account for a small minority of cases. Furthermore, these illegal acts also reflect the reality of increased political contestation, especially on the part of previously disadvantaged groups, who coalesced around new parties representing their interests. Many of these groups had been practically, if not legally, disenfranchised in previous eras.18
HEGEMONY, INTERRUPTED
Before delving into the nexus of crime and politics, a cursory review of the evolution of India’s electoral politics after 1947 i
s helpful. Political scientist Yogendra Yadav has argued that Indian politics since independence has experienced three distinct phases, or “electoral systems” (see figure 3.1).19 Each system—1952 to 1967, 1967 to 1989, and 1989 to the present—is characterized by a unique configuration of political power and format of political competition. These phases, it turns out, serve as useful milestones for tracking the rise of criminal politicians.
To quickly recap, the years between 1952 and 1967 comprise the first electoral system, when the Indian polity was firmly under the grip of the Congress Party. It was the heyday of the famed Congress system. In the second phase—from 1967 to 1989—the Congress-dominated system morphed into a more competitive multiparty system. The third phase, beginning in 1989 and lasting until the present, marks the era of coalition politics in Delhi and the increasing primacy of the states as the primary venues for political contestation. In this most recent iteration, democratic mobilization greatly expanded to include castes and communities who had been previously marginalized, or what Yadav has referred to as the “creolization” of democracy.20
Most analyses of the interplay between crime and politics focus on the third and most recent phase. However, the story really begins much earlier. Though implementing some of the world’s largest democratic elections—under considerable constraints—was an immense achievement, the earliest days of India’s electoral democracy were also crucial in giving rise to the rapport between crime and politics. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that parties and politicians were reliant on criminal elements for electoral purposes from the very first elections (and perhaps even before).21
Figure 3.1. Effective number of parties in Lok Sabha elections, 1952–2014. Dark-shaded bars indicate Congress Party rule. (Author’s calculations based on data from the Election Commission of India; Sanjay Kumar, “Regional Parties, Coalition Government and Functioning of Indian Parliament: The Changing Patterns,” Journal of Parliamentary Studies 1, no. 1 [June 2010]: 75–91)
“An Act of Faith”
Standard accounts of independent India’s first elections in the 1950s are understandably marked by the warm glow of the heady years following India’s emancipation from Britain. The period following the British departure saw India tick off a number of crowning achievements: the incorporation of hundreds of princely states (semi-sovereign entities the British never directly controlled) and the unification of what is recognized today as modern India; the successful drafting and ratification of a progressive constitution; and, of course, the execution of India’s first general election in 1951–52.
The creation of an independent ECI was enshrined in Article 324 of the constitution, which endowed it with relative independence from political interference. Yet the commission itself existed only on paper and literally had to be constructed from the ground up. In its efforts to plan and carry out India’s first elections, the commission was aided by a leader of tremendous capacity in the form of Sukumar Sen, an oft-forgotten but important figure in Indian democracy who served as India’s first chief election commissioner.22 Jawaharlal Nehru, as the country’s first prime minister and a true believer in the commission’s role in integrating and unifying India, also took it upon himself to bolster the stature of the commission in the early years, granting it ample latitude in organizing polls.23
The most readable account of Sen’s thankless task of preparing for, and carrying out, India’s first elections is provided by historian Ramachandra Guha in his book, India after Gandhi. Guha describes in vivid detail the enormity of the task faced by Sen and his colleagues and the extraordinary pressure he was under from Nehru and his government to carry out elections at the earliest possible date. Guha refers to the first general election as “an act of faith”; indeed, Sen himself had described the landmark polls in exactly such terms. The commission’s own narrative report reflecting on the 1951–52 general election is an inspiring read, further enhanced by the fact that the report did not come out until 1955, three years after the elections—a testament to the shoestring budget and limited manpower the commission had at its disposal.24
The first general election resulted in a landslide victory for the Congress. The party won 364 of 489 seats in Parliament, capturing 45 percent of the vote. The second largest party, the Communist Party of India (CPI), won a paltry 16 seats. Beyond the numerical significance of the victory margin, the successful execution of free and fair elections was of even greater symbolic importance for the fledgling democracy.
Yet India’s first landmark election was not without its blemishes; indeed, there were scattered reports of Congress politicians contracting with local strongmen in the very early days of the republic. Politicians allegedly relied on criminal or “antisocial” elements to coerce opponents, mobilize supporters, stuff ballot boxes, distribute clientelistic goods and handouts, and staff election campaigns, among other duties.25 In the 1951–2 general election, the ECI estimated that roughly 80 polling stations witnessed “minor breaches of law and order” and recorded 1,250 poll “incidents,” the vast majority of which (over 65 percent) had to do with the impersonation of voters.26 Polling was adjourned in 93 cases and had to be resumed at a later date on account of improprieties, ranging from the tampering of ballot boxes to coercive violence.27 Overall, these were relatively isolated incidents; the polling stations where law and order breaches were reported accounted for less than 1 percent of all polling places.
The Congress System
India’s inaugural general election kicked off the first phase of India’s electoral politics. Given the role the Congress played spearheading India’s independence movement, the party transcended the traditional boundaries that typically circumscribe the role of ordinary political parties. As such, it was accorded a kind of legitimacy that fed a widespread sense in the polity that “only Congress could be trusted” to run the country’s affairs.28 It served as the crucial link between the state and the citizenry at large.
While the constitution may have created the legal framework for holding India’s raucous democracy together, “the real cement was provided by the Congress.”29 In terms of ideological appeal, Congress functioned as a classic “big tent” political party; it occupied “not only the broad center for the political spectrum, but most of the left and right as well.”30 As such, it left little room for opposition parties to maneuver. Furthermore, Congress was the only political organization in existence that had the ability to reach all four corners of the country.31 In terms of the degree of its institutionalization, Congress was not only an outlier as far as India was concerned; scholar Steven Wilkinson writes that it was “one of the best-institutionalized political parties in any colony at independence.”32
To perpetuate its position of preeminence, the “Congress Raj” presided over a top-down brand of politics in which the Congress hierarchy essentially co-opted local notables or “bosses” who could exert power in their local constituencies.33 This power was derived from multiple sources—economic, social (namely, caste-based or ethnic), as well as coercive in some instances. Congress’s extensive local network, coupled with the uniqueness of its principled top-level leadership and the reservoir of nationalist goodwill it enjoyed, allowed it to nurture a heterogeneous social coalition with many contradictory impulses. During this period of dominance, Congress behaved at the ground level like a political machine that one scholar claimed “would have warmed the heart of legendary Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley”—albeit one that was less organized and coherent.34
Despite Congress’s catchall appeal and the economic resources its patronage networks could marshal, violence—whether actualized or threatened—did play a minor role. In 1957, the first instances of “booth capturing” were recorded in India. In its most essential form, booth capturing literally refers to the practice of politicians employing physical force to manipulate elections by commandeering polling booths and dictating the vote.
The process of booth capturing involved several steps, beginning with t
he pre-election contracting of “muscle” by politicians and the procurement and transfer of arms or other weaponry to the contracted muscle. Politicians reportedly exchanged pledges of protection from the state in return for perpetrating electoral fraud. Often the next step in the process involved influencing officials on election duty to strategically place booths in select locations within a candidate’s electoral constituency.35 Sometimes government officials on election duty were also bribed to omit selected names from the voter lists. The day of the election, local “influencers” hired by politicians would mobilize or suppress turnout as needed and engage in the “management” of election booths.36
The first recorded instances of alleged booth capturing occurred in the village of Rachiyari in Bihar’s Begusarai district, where Congress is believed to have pioneered the use of criminals in the electoral process.37 It is alleged that a group of upper-caste Bhumihars intimidated Yadav voters in the village so that they could cast votes for their favored candidate on their behalf.38 Begusarai was the stomping grounds of Kamdev Singh, one of the most notorious criminals-for-hire and a feared gang leader employed by the Congress Party to engage in booth capturing, who rose to political prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.39
In Bihar, as in many other parts of rural India, many upper-caste landowners had developed systems of institutionalized coercion and repression that they would wield—often through the hiring of “toughs”—to control peasants who were in their employ.40 These landowners were often powerful members of the rural elite and formed close alliances with Congress, in which state patronage was exchanged for the votes of villagers beholden to the landlords. This feudal setup was tailor-made for the deployment of muscle during elections.41
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