As troubling as Sanjay’s antics were, Congress was hardly the only party willing or able to play dirty. One journalistic account of the 1980 election in western Uttar Pradesh found “electoral fraud, perpetrated in practically every constituency” in the region.158 “Though rigging is nothing new” in the area, the author wrote, “the scale of unbridled rigging and booth capturing” carried out by all three major parties in the election was “unprecedented.” The election machinery was thoroughly cowed by antisocial elements; as one polling officer explained, he was given two choices by local goondas: “milk with cream” (offered to a guest) or “milk with turmeric” (typically offered to an injured person to heal wounds).159 From north Bihar, another correspondent wrote that “elections in this region rank amongst the premier cottage industries . . . as democracy recedes into smudgy limbo” and the “local brand of intrigue-ridden and caste-based hooliganism appears in sharper focus as a political reality.” In sum, the 1980 election was a “contest of muscle, social status and male dominance.”160
Just four years later, as India went to the polls following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the ECI reported that polling in 264 polling stations (across 53 constituencies) was “vitiated” due to factors such as “miscreants scaring away polling personnel, snatching away ballots papers/ballot boxes, rigging, prevention of voters belonging to weaker sections from reaching polling stations,” among others.161 Unfortunately, the ECI ceased publishing detailed, narrative reports on elections after the 1984 poll. Yet it is possible to piece together a picture from more recent elections on the basis of what other scholars have documented.
Booth capturing was said to have reached “serious proportions” in at least twelve states in the 1989 Lok Sabha election, particularly in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh.162 Whereas re-polls (due to improprieties) took place in only 65 booths during the 1957 election, that number shot up to 1,670 in 1989. Bihar on its own saw 1,046 re-polls in 1991 and another 1,273 in 1996. As one MLA stated at the time, “Unless you have one hundred men with guns you cannot contest elections in Bihar.”163 The rise in politically motivated murders was also astonishing. In the 1984 parliamentary election, 33 people were killed in Bihar, as were 28 others in state elections that year. In state elections in 1985, another 63 people were murdered in the run-up to the polls. In the difficult 1989 general election, Bihar witnessed 60 election-related deaths.164
According to a police report obtained by the newsmagazine India Today, there were 35 MLAs in the state of Uttar Pradesh (out of a house of 425) with criminal records in 1984. This number grew to 50 in 1989 and more than doubled to 133 in 1991. By 1993, there were 148 MLAs who either had run-ins with the law in the past or were wanted by the police for harboring connections with mafia groups. This number grew modestly to 152 in 1996; a pre-election report assembled by the Uttar Pradesh police stated that there were upwards of 55 gangs in the state patronized by political parties ahead of the polls.165 By 2002, the tally stood at 207 (while the overall strength of the house actually declined to 403).166 The number of criminally suspect legislators dipped in 2007 before rebounding in 2012, when their number stood at 181 (figure 3.3).
The scope of the problem was so immense that the government of India commissioned Home Secretary N. N. Vohra to conduct a study into the growing crime-politics nexus. While Vohra’s 1993 report was never publicly disclosed, a leaked summary provides the gist of the report. The report pulls no punches in assessing the magnitude of the criminalization of politics:
Figure 3.3. Uttar Pradesh MLAs with pending criminal cases, 1984–2012. (Data from Association for Democratic Reforms; Subhash Mishra, “A Criminal Record,” India Today, November 1, 2004)
There has been a rapid spread and growth of criminal gangs, armed senas, drug Mafias, smuggling gangs, drug peddlers and economic lobbies in the country which have, over the years, developed an extensive network of contacts with the bureaucrats/Government functionaries at the local levels, politicians, media persons and strategically located individuals in the non-State sector. In certain States, like Bihar, Haryana and UP, these gangs enjoy the patronage of local level politicians, cutting across party lines and the protection of governmental functionaries. Some political leaders become the leaders of these gangs/armed senas and, over the years, get themselves elected to local bodies, State Assemblies and the national Parliament. Resultantly, such elements have acquired considerable political clout.167
In September 1997, India’s chief election commissioner publicly declared that, of the nearly 14,000 candidates in the fray in the 1996 general election, about 1,500 candidates possessed criminal records of one sort of another. More than half of the total came from just two states—Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—but many other large states, such as Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, were also well represented. It was later reported in the media that at least 40 MPs with criminal records actually emerged victorious, while an additional 700 MLAs (out of 4,120) from the various state assemblies were under criminal scrutiny.168
Adaptation to the Marketplace
Paradoxically, at the same time that the number of suspected criminals standing for elections rapidly grew, the frequency and intensity of electoral malpractice began to suddenly reverse course. According to one source, the number of violent incidents declined from 3,363 in 1991 to 2,450 in 1998, and the number of deaths linked to elections dropped from 272 in 1991 to 65 in 1998 and 32 in 1999.169
The improvement in the sanctity of polls is due in large measure to the reassertion of authority by the ECI. The commission’s resurgence was part and parcel of a larger trend, which saw the reinvigoration of “referee” institutions that place restraints on the exercise of political power. As Devesh Kapur has observed, referee institutions (such as the CAG, ECI, and the presidency) were allowed space to regenerate precisely because India’s fragmented politics prevented any one party from dominating the political space. Faced with such a reality, most parties found it in their self-interest to have a credible umpire to keep an eye on its rivals, even if that meant submitting to greater scrutiny.170
In reinvigorating its regulatory authority to curb the worst of India’s poll-related excesses, leadership would also prove crucial, especially that of the hardheaded T. N. Seshan. In the early to mid 1990s, Seshan infused the role of India’s chief election commissioner with the missionary zeal of a democratic crusader, seized with the fear that ordinary Indians were losing faith in the institution of the Election Commission specifically and the democratic process in general. Since the early 1960s, the Election Commission had tried to get parties and politicians to abide by a “Model Code of Conduct,” a voluntary set of principles meant to guide the conduct of candidates, parties, and incumbent governments during election time, with little success.171
By dint of his personality, Seshan transitioned from championing the code to actually implementing it, leveraging the moral voice of the commission and the reach of the news media to publicly shame politicians and parties who crossed him. In addition to reinvigorating the model code, the commission also took a number of complementary steps to safeguard the electoral process, from switching from paper ballots to electronic voting machines less susceptible to capture, to coordinating with the Home Ministry to deploy security forces to protect polling booths, and to enhancing local-level surveillance and monitoring capacity through the creative use of technology.172
As successful as the Seshan-led crackdown on electoral malpractice was, it failed to eliminate criminality in politics; rather, it merely altered its outward manifestation. As booth capturing and brazen intimidation at the polling booth declined, criminal politicians adapted their operating procedures accordingly. This is important to note because, as is discussed in greater detail later, criminality in politics cannot be reduced to coercion or the perpetration of violence alone. In many cases, these may be manifestations of the criminalization of politics, but it would be inaccurate to conclude that candidates with criminal reputa
tions only win elections by virtue of violent antidemocratic acts.
As overt forms of violence receded in elections, the role of money in politics grew exponentially in the 1990s, thanks, in part, to the increasing competitiveness of elections. Criminals had an advantage in this regard because they had both greater access to funds and the means to raise them (more on this in the following chapter). Thus, while criminals became less reliant on overt uses of force, they (and the parties that supported them) doubled down on the use of “money power” in elections. Indeed, a survey of more than 200 MLAs from five states conducted in 1996 found that 82 percent believed politics was more corrupt than before; 68 percent stated that the situation will get worse in the future, and—ironically—these politicians held “politicians” themselves most responsible for this bleak outlook.173
Another reason criminals were able to adapt to the new realities imposed by the Election Commission is because they became integrated with the state apparatus over time. They soon had other levers of power with which to shape politics and election outcomes other than resorting to fraud or employing outward expressions of force or malpractice. In addition, there were limits on how far the writ of the Election Commission could travel. As one villager once told me in Bihar on the eve of that state’s 2010 election, “The Election Commission may control the polling booths, but it is not present in the villages.” This lack of overarching institutional oversight implied that politicians freely do a number of things to influence elections, including intimidating voters in their localities, distributing money, or sending more subtle signals of force and power. As K. Balagopal has written, threats made in advance of the election can be cashed in once elections are over, by which time Seshan and his colleagues are back in Delhi, and their jurisdiction over local circumstances is nil.174
As discussed in Chapter 1, by 2014 the extent of criminality in the Lok Sabha and the various state assemblies reached record levels. And suffice it to say that the nexus of crime and politics is alive and well in India, notwithstanding the efforts by the Election Commission to tackle some of the most brazen forms of electoral malpractice and violence.
Three Routes for the Criminalization of Politics
Thus far, I have treated the recruitment of criminals into politics as synonymous with the criminalization of politics. To be fair, this approach is an oversimplification, and it is worth briefly discussing why. The “criminalization of politics” actually describes three distinct, albeit related, political processes. The first is what has been covered thus far: individuals who initially gained notoriety as criminals but who eventually entered the electoral domain and became entrenched within the contemporary party system.
The criminalization of politics also entails a second process, which is when individuals who had no previous ties to illegality resort to such activity in order to obtain or preserve political power. This trajectory is, anecdotally, quite common. Such individuals were first and foremost politicians but later developed links with criminals or obtained serious criminal records of their own because they became corrupted by the system or desired an advantage over their opponents. Typically, these politicians developed connections to criminals who could be a source of election finance and/or contracted with muscle power to further a political or electoral objective. While such officials entered office free of any criminal associations, the positions they held precipitated their involvement with criminals and other unsavory elements. The difference between this pathway and the standard narrative of parties recruiting “criminals” is that while politicians may have developed criminal ties or picked up serious criminal cases, this development occurred after joining politics.
The third and final process contributing to the criminalization of politics is the wholesale conversion of criminal organizations into political entities. Here, criminal groups or gangs that were not previously electorally focused transformed themselves into political parties in order to capture power. This pathway is unique and quite rare. Political scientist James Manor cites the Shiv Sena of Maharashtra as the only such organization to have attained widespread electoral success.175
However, there are several other examples of smaller players making this jump. In Bihar, leaders of the Ranvir Sena, a militia formed to protect the interests of the upper-caste, landed Bhumihar community, joined electoral politics in the 1980s to further the agenda of their caste group, which at its core was to perpetuate their centuries-old social dominance in south and central Bihar and to defend itself against violent Naxal attacks. Leaders of the militia openly fused violent tactics and electoral politics in an effort to consolidate support from the Bhumihars and allied groups, counteracting lower-caste communities who opposed them through intimidation. While the Ranvir Sena did not form its own party, it built alliances with existing formations. The precise partisan affiliations mattered little; both the militia leaders and the political operators were driven by sheer opportunism. Given their political clout, members of the Ranvir Sena came to function as “sub-contractors hired by the political and administrative wings of the state to enforce the dominance of the state” in society.”176
Another example comes from neighboring Uttar Pradesh, where Afzal Ansari, one of the six temporarily sprung MPs who was brought to vote on the no-confidence motion in Parliament in the summer of 2008, and his brother Mukhtar Ansari launched a political party in 2010 known as Quami Ekta Dal (QED). The Ansari brothers are influential politicians in the eastern region of Uttar Pradesh known as Purvanchal, a swath of northern India that has been the stage of a violent struggle between rival gangs, each headed by a politician. The Ansaris are said to control one of the most influential factions, who openly (and often violently) feud over lucrative contract work, known as thekadari.177
In the past, the brothers cycled through both the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, the two biggest regional parties in Uttar Pradesh, until their alleged criminal exploits began to create headaches for the party leadership. The siblings responded by launching their own party; Afzal acts as party president, and Mukhtar and another brother, Sibgatullah, serve as MLAs in the Uttar Pradesh assembly.178 “If someone calls me a ‘mafia don,’ it makes no difference,” Mukhtar told the author Patrick French. “Can they name one person I have attacked who comes from a weaker section? I have always fought against the powerful, I have taken power from them.”179 In another interview, Ansari put it this way: “Anyone I killed got what they deserved but it’s not like I killed a boatload of people. . . . If anyone troubles the poor, I will murder them.”180
Although these three pathways are analytically distinct, the underlying factors discussed here to explain the criminalization of politics still pertain—although the precise sequence of events varies somewhat in each.
THE ORIGIN OF SUPPLY
The nexus of crime and politics, far from a product of the recent past, has deeply historical roots in India. It is the present balance of forces between criminals and politicians, where the two identities have become thoroughly fused, that is of more recent vintage.
Although the fusion of crime and politics often gets discussed as a purely north Indian phenomenon, it has far more diverse roots. Clearly, north India does boast a fair amount of criminality in politics, but the phenomenon extends to most parts of the country. One reason for this geographic stereotyping might have to do with the outsized influence of Bollywood, the hub of Hindi-medium cinema. But, in fact, goondagiri is a recurring theme across linguistic and cultural settings.181
This chapter has outlined the first step in understanding the electoral marketplace for criminals: the motivations of criminals to join active politics. But the supply of criminals into politics cannot be reduced to the decisions of these individuals alone, for this leaves out the calculations of a key intervening actor: political parties. The next chapter will review their role in injecting supply into the marketplace.
4 The Costs of Democracy
How Money Fuels Muscle in Elections
/> “IT IS TOO hot for campaigning, sir,” the aide explained. “We will take our lunch and then try again in the late afternoon.” It was 104 degrees in the shaded area of the porch where I was sitting and the aide’s words provided a welcome reprieve.1
Elections were only two weeks away in this predominantly rural constituency located in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.2 On this particularly scorching day, I had come to spend some time with a candidate who was standing for elections to the Andhra state assembly. Due to the relentless heat this time of year, candidates would visit constituents first thing in the morning before breaking around ten or eleven, at which point the sun’s glare became unbearable. They would resume again in the late afternoon, when the worst had passed, and stay out as late as their bodies could stand it before collapsing.
Fortunately for me, I was scheduled to accompany the candidate in his well-air-conditioned SUV for his afternoon and evening engagements. The candidate, whose identity I agreed not to reveal but will call “Sanjay,” was a newcomer to politics. Sanjay was well educated, quite wealthy by Indian standards, and had several years’ experience in the private sector. Despite his parents’ qualms and his wife’s protestations, he had decided to take the plunge into electoral politics.
When Crime Pays Page 14
