When Crime Pays

by Milan Vaishnav

  Yet it was not for another six years that Kejriwal’s likeness would be beamed into the living rooms of millions of Indian households around the country. The issue the former babu (bureaucrat) rode to stardom was a proposed piece of legislation to set up a federal anticorruption ombudsman known as a Lokpal. An entire book could be written about the tortuous history of the Lokpal bill, but in a word it can best be described as “fraught.” Parliament first considered the bill in 1968, although it failed to win approval. Futile attempts at passage were mounted in 1971, 1977, 1985, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2008. Each time the bill failed to make it through both houses.2 Politicians typically enjoy espousing anticorruption rhetoric, but they prefer to leave the implementation to the next guy.

  In 2010, in the wake of a crippling series of big-ticket corruption scandals, the UPA government was compelled to try once more. One high-profile scam after another, from “Coal-gate” to the Commonwealth Games scandal, had sapped the energy of the government, forcing it to find ways of saving face. Kejriwal was convinced that establishing a Lokpal was a game changer as far as India’s governance was concerned. He felt passionately that existing anticorruption agencies, such as the CBI, were all compromised, due to either incapacity or outright government sabotage. Kejriwal, unsurprisingly, reserved his greatest ire for the country’s crooked politicians. “There are honest and efficient officers in the CBI,” Kejriwal told a reporter, “but their political bosses do not allow them to work freely.”3

  Parliament, he insisted, was full of “rapists, murderers and looters.”4 According to him, given the endemic corruption generations of Indians have suffered, only an independent and autonomous Lokpal would “set this country in the right direction.”5 “If the Lokpal bill was passed,” he once remarked, “half of the MPs would go to jail.”6

  There was one catch, however: Kejriwal greatly disliked the government’s proposed bill, which he felt lacked the teeth necessary to make much of a dent in the country’s corruption scourge. Furthermore, he was deeply anxious that the government would pass a feckless bill yet receive political credit for “doing something.” Under the aegis of a new social movement called India Against Corruption (IAC), Kejriwal launched a campaign to replace the government’s bill with what came to be known as the Jan Lokpal bill, literally the “citizen’s ombudsman” bill. The bill proposed by IAC had much stronger provisions than the one the government proposed and would apply to politicians operating at the highest level of the government, including the prime minister.

  But Kejriwal and his colleagues lacked a compelling face, someone who could raise the movement’s profile in the mass media as well as with ordinary citizens. The answer to Kejriwal’s dilemma came in the form of Anna Hazare, an octogenarian social reformer and noted devotee of Gandhian methods of civil disobedience. For decades, Hazare had toiled in relative obscurity in the state of Maharashtra working on issues of social reform, government transparency, and local governance, but he had a solid reputation as a selfless social crusader. The very sight of the slight Hazare taking on the mighty government of India made him an overnight celebrity.

  Once united, Kejriwal and Hazare succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in getting the corruption issue on the national agenda. One crude, back-of-the-envelope method of quantifying this is by tracking the relative number of times Indians ran Google searches for “corruption” over the past decade (figure 7.1). A large spike in 2011, at the height of IAC’s agitations, is clearly discernible.

  After joining forces with IAC, Hazare’s opening salvo was to announce that he would fast until his group’s demands for a Jan Lokpal bill were met. After almost 100 hours, during which sizeable crowds gathered at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to cheer Hazare, Kejriwal, and colleagues on, the government capitulated, announcing the creation of a joint drafting committee consisting of government and civil society representatives. Together, the government proclaimed, ministers and activists would work to forge a compromise solution.

  The negotiations and the polarized debate were tumultuous, to say the least. A key government representative on the drafting committee called the Jan Lokpal bill a “Frankenstein Monster without accountability” and an “oppressive institution” operating outside the bounds of the state.7 Even respected independent voices, broadly sympathetic with IAC’s larger objectives, did not withhold their fire. In a stinging op-ed piece, one scholar accused the IAC bill of “crossing the lines of reasonableness . . . premised on an institutional imagination that is at best naïve, at worst subversive of representative democracy.”8 One of the critics’ biggest issues had to do with the moral certitude of the bill’s backers. Calling the Jan Lokpal neither the best nor the only solution to India’s corruption malaise, political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta dismissed as a “dangerous illusion” the idea that any one institution could be a “magic wand” to tackle corruption.9

  Figure 7.1. Weekly Google search interest in India for “corruption,” 2004–14. The total volume of Google searches is divided by the total searches of the geography in a given time range. The resulting numbers are then scaled to a number between 0 and 100, as represented on the y-axis. (Author’s calculations based on data from Google Trends)

  Kejriwal, Hazare, and their colleagues were undeterred, calling their fight India’s “second struggle for independence.”10 In response to the claim that his agitational style was antidemocratic, Kejriwal turned the criticism around: “We want real democracy. Not going out and voting once in five years democracy. That is pretense democracy.”11

  The negotiations, however, failed to reach a compromise, at which point Hazare once again announced his intention to go on a hunger strike. This time he endured nearly 300 hours without food and drew criticism from many of his IAC colleagues for blackmailing the government into submission. Aruna Roy, one of India’s leading advocates for greater government transparency and a onetime IAC ally, blasted Hazare and Kejriwal’s “my-way-or-the-highway” approach: “A Lokpal Bill is not a hereditary right of a group of people anywhere in this country.”12

  The government introduced a revised version of its own bill in late 2011, but it was not until 2013 that both houses managed to provide their assent and the bill became a law. Kejriwal, far from celebrating this victory, was irate. The government, he boomed, had turned the Lokpal bill into a “Jokepal.”13

  After the tamasha (spectacle) of hunger strikes, protests, and failed negotiations, Hazare chose to return to his village home in rural Maharashtra. Kejriwal, who had once proclaimed that “all the politicians are thieves—throw them to the vultures,” opted for politics, announcing his decision to create a new anticorruption political party, the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party, or AAP.14 The party’s first test was the upcoming Delhi state elections, and its number one objective was to pass a Jan Lokpal bill for the city-state. In the Delhi elections, AAP surprised political pundits by performing extremely well, capturing 28 of Delhi’s 70 seats, enough to form a government with the outside support of the Congress Party and to make Arvind Kejriwal, once described as “the man the government loves to hate,” the chief minister of Delhi.15

  Even after the AAP formed its inaugural government in Delhi, Kejriwal maintained his activist style, eschewing the comforts and, some argued, the responsibilities, of public office. In one of his first actions as chief minister, Kejriwal led a dharna (sit-in) at one of Delhi’s main roundabouts, referring to himself as an “anarchist” and noting that “there are some things that cannot be done from air-conditioned offices.”16

  As it turns out, Kejriwal’s Jan Lokpal bill for Delhi faced enormous hurdles; when the opposition signaled its resistance, Kejriwal resigned and pulled the plug on his ill-fated 49-day government, claiming it was “more important to fight corruption than to run a government.”17 Initially, Kejriwal appeared confident in the rightness of his resignation, saying, “We have come here to save the country. If we have to give up the chief minister’s post for the sake of the country, we will do it not a hun
dred times but a thousand times.”18 However, he would later come to regret his decision: Bharat ki politics mein jo bhi ho jaye, kabhi isteefa nahin dena chahiye! (Whatever happens in Indian politics, one should never give their resignation!), he admitted months later.19 Yet the damage was done. Soon after his resignation, AAP announced its intention to take its fight across the country. In the 2014 national elections, it contested 432 seats but won just 4 (all in the state of Punjab). In Delhi, to add insult to injury, it was shut out entirely. Kejriwal had moved too far too fast, forsaking local power for a place on the national stage. In January 2015, having profusely apologized to the Delhi electorate and recommitted himself to local matters, Kejriwal pulled a rabbit out of a hat—again surprising political handicappers by leading the AAP to a sweep in fresh elections in Delhi.

  The political upstart partially redeemed himself after badly misjudging the national political mood in 2014. But perhaps an even more grave miscalculation was focusing excessively on Lokpal to the detriment of broader institutional reform. Kejriwal and IAC had a unique moment, coming on the heels of revelations detailing spectacular corruption, to construct a broad governance reform agenda and rally support for it. Although they may not have intended it, IAC and Kejriwal portrayed Lokpal as a panacea for India’s corruption woes, which it most certainly was not. This, of course, leads to the question: what steps are needed to weed criminals and corrupt individuals out of India’s politics?

  DRIVING AT TWO SPEEDS

  In Part II, I examined the marketplace that exists in India today, and in the recent past, for politicians who possess serious criminal records. In Part III, I begin with a focus on the menu of policy actions that should be considered to curb their popularity. However, any discussion of policy reform prompts an obvious response: if there is a demand (and supply) for allegedly criminal lawmakers, must any action be taken at all to remove them from politics? At the end of the day, such politicians emerge victorious in some of the world’s most competitive elections where voters often have a choice between candidates with criminal records and those without. If voters choose the former, should that be grounds for policy intervention?

  Notwithstanding the existence of a competitive electoral marketplace, there are several reasons why cleansing Indian politics of politicians with serious criminal records, many of whom exploit those very reputations for political gain, makes good public policy sense. If one is convinced that making a concerted effort to shape public policy in ways that might minimize, if not totally eliminate, the nexus between crime and politics is worthwhile, the next step is to identify the universe of potential reform solutions. Previous chapters have established fairly conclusively that a lack of information on the part of parties or voters is not the binding constraint. If the constraint were principally oriented around information asymmetries, one could imagine relatively straightforward remedial policies, such as campaigns to raise voter awareness, bolster media scrutiny, or improve the quality of civic education. But the story is not one primarily about information failures; rather, it is about the failure of the state to produce effective governance in a complex, multiethnic democracy. This reality makes the menu of possible actions much more difficult—but not impossible—to pin down.

  If criminality in politics is truly a product of widespread governance failures, any single institutional fix—such as setting up a Lokpal—will be insufficient. The underlying cause of the problem is far too deep and too complex to lend itself to silver bullet policy prescriptions. In order to achieve sustainable solutions, reformers must instead operate at two distinct levels: they must systematically address the deep roots of these failures, which represents a long-run objective, while simultaneously addressing proximate factors in the short term.

  On the former, there is no getting around the fact that the capacity of the Indian state to perform even its most basic tasks of governance and service delivery is wholly inadequate (a syndrome discussed at some length in Chapter 2). These critical failures have, in turn, created space for political entrepreneurs to leverage their criminality into sizeable political support. By strengthening the state’s capacity to project its authority, the governance vacuum that criminal politicians seek to fill will gradually contract.

  Ironically, much of the policy debate in Delhi or in other world capitals when India is discussed is focused on how to get the Indian state out of the way. This is not without cause. Even as many have pronounced the License Raj era dead and gone, the Indian state continues to frustrate and confound with the unending red tape its bureaucracy generates and the innumerable ways in which it acts as an oppressive force. From the mundane—getting an Indian passport or obtaining a driver’s license—to the major—filing a police complaint or seeking damages from a court of law—a large percentage of those who interact with most public sector agencies comes away with a feeling of dissatisfaction if not outright frustration. A 2014 Pew survey found that 83 percent of Indians believe that corrupt public officials are a “very big” problem for the country.20 Surveys of citizen satisfaction with many basic public services, such as water or healthcare, also demonstrate tremendous popular disenchantment.21

  This red tape then becomes the lifeblood for self-interested politicians to manipulate the state’s discretionary levers in ways that contravene the public interest once they are in office. In reorienting the state, reformers must proceed thoughtfully. In some areas, India has to massively cut down on the procedural burdens its bureaucracy imposes, but in other areas—many of which touch upon core activities of sovereign nations—the state must be built from the ground up. “Downsizing the state” or “enlarging the state” are imperfect catch phrases; what is needed, in a nutshell, is for the Indian state to be “right-sized.” A priority area of action in tackling the challenge posed by criminal politicians is in the rule of law domain, whose weaknesses both give rise to criminal politicians and help perpetuate their relevance. This is an area marked by oppressive legal and regulatory frameworks and serious capacity constraints that render the state far too weak to effectively enforce its writ.

  Building state capacity, however, is not something that can be accomplished overnight. As Max Weber famously wrote, politics is a long, hard slog—akin to watching the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.”22 Refashioning the state represents, at every step of the way, the quintessential political challenge. Thus, resizing India’s state, as it were, is—at best—a generational task. Hence, while pushing for systemic long-term reforms, those seeking to reduce the relevance of criminality in politics must work on parallel tracks. While reformers continue to push for major governance upgrades, they must simultaneously grapple with the proximate causes of the criminal-politician nexus. This means engaging in a variety of near-term steps, such as fixing India’s broken system of regulating political finance, reforming political parties’ internal functioning, restricting the most egregious suspected lawbreakers from holding office, and curbing the most overt campaigning on sectarian lines.

  WHY REFORM?

  Politicians with serious criminal records do not appear out of thin air; to the contrary, individuals who face serious criminal scrutiny have their own self-interested motivations for joining the democratic process. And, of course, there are animating factors that make them attractive to both political parties and voters.

  This reality should inform any conversation about freeing, or cleansing, the political sphere of candidates linked to wrongdoing. A cynic might reasonably ask: if politicians with criminal records succeed in highly competitive elections where voters willingly elect—indeed, often reelect—them, where is the harm? This skeptical line of questioning, though natural, glosses over the corrosive effects the fusion of crime and politics can have in democratic systems.

  For starters, the fact that many of India’s leading lawmakers, across all tiers of governance, are also among its foremost (alleged) lawbreakers has serious implications for the sanctity of the rule of law. The presence of so many legislators wh
o possess serious criminal records can have a subtle but pervasive negative impact on popular perceptions of the rule of law. If citizens believe that the rule of law can be openly flouted without repercussion, given that so many individuals who actually write the country’s laws may be doing the same, these perceptions can create a self-fulfilling reality, thereby encouraging widespread disrespect for the law.

  Second, one new study shows that constituencies with an elected representative who has an ongoing criminal case experience significantly lower rates of economic growth. This negative effect is even larger when the incumbent faces serious cases or cases involving financial crimes or hails from states with endemic corruption and weak institutions. The authors of the study surmise that this is a by-product of lower investment in public goods provision.23

  When it comes to social welfare, it is true that there is some segment of the electorate that stands to gain from the presence of criminal politicians. If politicians linked to crime are able to successfully deliver on their promises to “get things done” for their constituents, it could generate real welfare gains for society. Yet these improvements are not likely to be evenly distributed; there may be gains for certain segments of society, but politicians who tout their criminal reputations thrive by exploiting—not resolving—social divisions. Their modus operandi, as repeatedly shown in Part II, relies principally on catering to narrow segments of the electorate rather than the population at large. Given India’s first-past-the-post electoral system, in which elections at the constituency level are regularly won with substantially less than a majority of votes, winning coalitions can be quite narrow.24 Although members of the winning coalition might be better off with an allied criminal politician ensconced in power, those outside this coalition could remain unaffected or perhaps even worse off.