When Crime Pays

by Milan Vaishnav

  The dilemma criminally suspect politicians pose is somewhat distinctive in that many potential solutions to ridding politics of criminal elements are internal to the precise nature of the dilemma to begin with. Politicians with criminal records are able to persist in everyday politics because, as far as the law is concerned, they are innocent until proven guilty. Furthermore, establishing guilt is difficult for a host of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the justice system in India is so backlogged that it can take decades (if at all) for criminal cases to reach their logical conclusion. This important reality implies that barring such individuals from joining politics risks interfering with basic attributes of the rule of law in democratic settings. While it is worth pursuing reform interventions to address the supply side in the near term, one must proceed with caution since the first rule of reform is always “do no harm.”

  UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

  Any study that attempts to shed light on themes as complex as democracy, governance, or criminality is likely to throw up as many questions as answers. This book is certainly no exception. Going forward, digging deeper in order to decipher answers to these queries will paint a more refined picture of the ins and outs of the electoral marketplace for criminality in India and beyond.

  By Hook or by Crook

  A key takeaway from this book is that criminal candidates can use their criminality to signal their credibility in at least four ways. As shorthand, I have referred to these mechanisms as: redistribution, coercion, social insurance, and dispute resolution. As evidence for each of these, I rely on the extant ethnographic literature as well as insights from fieldwork in India. Nevertheless, further research is necessary to understand the relative weights voters place on each of these mechanisms. One could imagine, for instance, that the utility of each of these strategies might vary according to contextual factors as well as the characteristics of the relevant target population. Voters of a certain type might prioritize justice, whereas residents of another area might place a higher value on social insurance. An experimental research design (such as a survey experiment) could shed light on the relative merits of these various mechanisms and possibly uncover others not contemplated here.

  Criminality and Policy Outcomes

  To date, collective understanding of the impacts of the electoral marketplace for criminality on citizens’ daily lives is quite limited. The trick, of course, is to find suitable data on a policy outcome that is measurable and that politicians can appreciably impact in the short run.

  The few studies that have found innovative ways of measuring impacts thus far have focused largely on welfare or crime measures. What remains unexplored is the effect that criminality in democratic politics is having on people’s attitudes. How does the existence of criminal politicians affect how people view the rule of law? How does it shape their perception of politics? And how does it influence the choices of those who are considering a life in active politics?

  The Talent Pool for Politics

  One shortcoming of this analysis, and of nearly all studies that are interested in the quality of candidates, is that very little is known—typically, nothing at all—about those candidates parties do not select to contest elections. No doubt, one can learn a great deal by observing those candidates who contest elections, but this misses out on the broader pool of possible candidates.50 Only by peering into that typically invisible group can one more conclusively examine how parties decide whom, from within that pool, to select.51 This is, of course, especially relevant in democratic countries where intraparty democracy is weak, party organization is largely a top-down affair, and primaries are not operative. To properly look into this, researchers need access to the inner workings of the party decision-making process. Doing so could open up a new frontier in the study of candidate selection.52

  Corruption versus Criminality

  Corruption and criminality are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct analytical concepts. Corrupt activities might be criminal, but not all criminal acts are inherently corrupt (where corruption is defined as the “use of public office for private gain”).

  When it comes to voter behavior, there is sufficient reason to believe that voters might respond differently to candidates who are known to be “corrupt” as opposed to those who are “criminal.” Thinking about, and testing, the differences between the two could help resolve why voters from diverse settings, when exposed to information regarding the corrupt behavior of their politicians, do often appear to punish them for their transgressions. Much of the extant evidence for voters responding to new information about the malfeasance of politicians concerns financial corruption (namely, embezzlement or bribe taking) rather than criminality.

  There is one obvious explanation for why information about corruption in a place like India might impact voters in a fundamentally different manner than revelations about criminality. One might expect, for example, that voters would react more negatively to information that reveals their representative is embezzling local funds than to news of him attacking a political rival or beating up a government official in order to extract benefits for the constituency.

  Or perhaps, as some recent research has found, voters might be willing to “hold their noses” and vote for corrupt politicians insofar as those same corrupt politicians find ways of directing material benefits to them. For instance, research from Brazil has found that while voters do punish corrupt incumbents, this punishment is contingent on the amount of public expenditure they receive. As public expenditure increases, the negative relationship between corruption and reelection disappears.53 A similar study from Spain finds that voters ignore corruption allegations against incumbents in circumstances where they derive clear side benefits from those corrupt actions.54 The extent of this kind of behavior in India remains an open question, but it seems plausible that voters in India might also condition their voting behavior on whether they perceive the corrupt acts in question to materially benefit them or not. Corruption, in and of itself, could be a neutral cue; it is the nature of the corruption and, more important, the externalities it produces that matter.

  Illicit Financing

  Illicit political finance is an issue that touches a great many democracies, especially those in the developing world. Advanced democracies are not immune to malfeasance or scandals associated with election funding, and in countries like the United States, there are concerns that the transparency and accountability that have characterized the operations of these regulatory systems are weakening. But in more established democracies, by and large, there are well-established systems of monitoring and accounting for election finance and for prosecuting those who break the law. While imperfect, the strength of these regulatory systems likely acts as an effective deterrent.55

  The situation in developing countries and nascent democracies is often worse. In developing countries, illicit campaign finance expenditures are typically orders of magnitude larger than what campaign spending disclosures suggest. As one scholar has noted, this reality is often referred to as the “rule of ten”—the idea that actual election expenditures are ten times the reported amounts.56 There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence regarding the presence of illicit (or black) money in elections, but there has been little analysis of these flows, and for obvious reasons. After all, flows of black money are opaque: they involve under-the-table transfers that are unobservable and therefore difficult to quantify.

  Resorting to candidates associated with criminality is one way money warps politics, but parties typically oversee a more diversified portfolio or “menu” of election finance options. In a developing country context, for instance, one needs to consider that parties might rely on businessmen candidates, illicit money from abroad, and/or kickbacks from government contracts. There is very little known about what these options are, their relative merits, and under what conditions parties resort to a given strategy in a given electoral setting.

  SCOPE CONDITIONS

  One ob
vious issue any study that draws heavily from one country’s experience must confront is the applicability of this single case to the broader world. Any such exercise must first begin with an articulation of the “scope conditions” of the theory, or the conditions under which one would expect to see criminality and politics interact. These conditions can tell us something about the universe of cases this book may hold lessons for.

  First and most obviously, the core arguments of this book are restricted to democracies and, specifically, to that subset of democracies where deep social divisions exist, which politicians can exploit for political or electoral purposes. Throughout the text, I have taken as a given that the relevant cleavage in society, insofar as India is concerned, revolves around the question of ethnic identity. This condition is clearly evident in a wide range of democracies, and there is a vast literature that suggests that ethnic identity is the most important axis around which politics revolves in many developing as well as developed societies. The presence of social divisions alone, it is important to point out, does not necessarily mean that these differences will have political salience. But their existence is a necessary condition, creating a permissive environment for identity-based forms of mobilization to occur. Whether they are activated depends on numerous contingent factors, including the incentive calculations of political elites.

  A second scope condition is the weak rule of law. When the state cannot adequately enforce its writ, voters will be more inclined to exchange political support to non-state actors who can privately provide these goods. Politicians, in turn, can exercise considerable discretion over state resources once in office, and they can comfortably break or bend the rules with a reasonably low probability that they will face legal consequences for those actions.

  When these conditions—democracy, social divisions, and weak rule of law—are operative, space opens up for political entrepreneurs who can take advantage by marketing themselves as self-styled Robin Hoods, willing to act as a surrogate state. Democracy affords opportunities for political entrepreneurship, social divisions provide a platform for opportunistic mobilization, and the weak rule-of-law setting offers a permissive environment to engage in extralegal behavior to obtain political office and to reap the spoils once ensconced there.

  It is, of course, possible to relax the assumption that social divisions necessarily manifest themselves through ethnicity alone. Although I assume that ethnicity is the primary relevant cleavage throughout this study, one could imagine other possibilities. The validity of the theory rests on the fact that social cleavages exist and that they provide a sufficient basis for politicians to identify, target, and mobilize voters.

  For instance, in Colombia’s criminalized politics there was a proliferation of politicians in the 2000s either actively tied to left-wing guerrillas (such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC) or linked with paramilitaries (such as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC) established to counter the influence of such fringe groups. This collusion between politicians and paramilitary organizations came to be known as “parapolitics,” and it helped spawn bottom-up political economy regimes built around crime.57 Politicians from both camps did not mobilize on ethnic grounds but rather on their ability to use their associations with violent groups to take control of the local state and channel benefits and protection to individuals associated with their respective causes. This cleavage operated on an ideological or class divide rather than one centered on ascriptive identities.58

  Indeed, one can discern such non-identity-based cleavages even within India itself. For instance, the prevalence of criminal politics in West Bengal ostensibly has little to do with ethnic divides. Rather, the overriding salient social cleavage in Bengali politics is party identification. For decades, politics in that state has revolved around a pro-Left/anti-Left axis, with the Congress Party largely filling the anti-Left space.59 Today, both the Congress Party in Bengal and the Left Front have been badly degraded; a spin-off of the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, is currently politically dominant. Today Bengali politics is perhaps more accurately described as pro-Trinamool/anti-Trinamool, but the overall dynamic is similar.

  Whereas ethnicity might serve as the principal social cleavage and basis upon which criminal politicians mobilize in Bihar or Andhra Pradesh, in West Bengal the “politics of dignity” revolves around partisan attachments. Across all political stages in the state’s recent history, the embrace of criminality on the part of politicians representing dueling political fronts has remained constant.60 “Goondaism is a great political leveller in West Bengal,” writes one observer. “One regime changes, another comes but political goondaism goes on forever” in the state.61

  Partisan affiliation, not ethnic identity, is also the primary axis around which political criminality and violence transpire in parts of Kerala, particularly in the state’s northern reaches. There, since at least the 1960s, violence has “become the public face and means of enhancing influence and power” in politics.62 Some accounts claim that there have been between 150 and 200 deaths due to “political clashes” over the last few decades, most occurring between right-wing Hindu nationalist forces affiliated with the RSS/BJP and members of the CPI(M).63 Yet the use of criminality in everyday politics functions in remarkably similar ways; in the words of one scholar, politicians in Kerala regularly deploy “illiberal means to achieve ends that are at the heart of liberal electoral democracy.”64 Each of the warring partisan sides, in turn, accuses the other of being the aggressor, choosing to hide behind the cloak of “defensive criminality.”

  EXTERNAL VALIDITY

  With these scope conditions in mind, are there examples of democracies—other than India—in which these conditions pertain and we observe politicians linked with illegal activity thriving in the electoral domain? One example is Nigeria, which (like India) is a populous, multiethnic, federal democracy. Several scholars have pointed out that Nigeria’s return to democracy following its landmark 1999 election has been marked by the presence of a pervasive nexus between criminals and politicians.65 As several scholars of Nigerian politics have noted, a political candidate’s strength is measured by his ability to mobilize support and financial resources, including through the use of violence.66 Because Nigeria’s parties are elite-driven entities with little ideological core or organizational foundations, political competition revolves around ethnic identity such that elections are transformed into “highly competitive zero-sum games.”67 “In the absence of other viable social categories for the protection of group interests,” writes scholar Daniel Smith, “one ethnic group’s apparent political gain is viewed by others as a potential loss.”68 The winner-take-all nature of Nigerian politics helps explain the viability of candidates who can use any means at their disposal (including extralegal means) to maximize their group’s social position.69

  Many politicians in Nigeria gain strength from their connection to “godfathers,” who are typically party elites who wield outsized influence in party decision-making processes. Godfathers play a role not only in deploying violence on behalf of their preferred candidates but also in financing elections and organizing fraud.70 Because the costs of elections are high and rising (the spoils of Nigeria’s natural resources have long been shared among the country’s politicians, thus making elected office highly lucrative), many aspirants to elected office struggle to raise the funds necessary to be electorally competitive. As a result, electorally successful candidates are often those sponsored by godfathers, who can easily channel funds into campaign coffers in exchange for fealty.71

  Jamaica is another example of a democracy whose politics is defined by the coexistence of democratic elections and politicians tied to criminality.72 Historically, politicians used their influence with the police to provide cover for the illegal activities of gangs, including gun running and drug smuggling. In exchange, politicians enlisted gang members to provide the requisite muscle power, especially during elections, and to deliver votes.
73 Many residents viewed the local “dons” who presided over the criminal racket as “protectors,” and politicians benefited immensely from brandishing their intimate links with them.

  Indeed, research suggests that a core attribute of political life in Jamaica is a phenomenon referred to as “badness-honor,” which is not entirely dissimilar from the Indian concept of dabangg.74 “Badness,” in Jamaican parlance, is a form of stylized outlawry, scholar Obika Gray has argued, which affirms racially charged defiance as the basis for social respect or honor. In recent decades, political displays of this attribute have become de rigueur in urban Jamaican politics. In elections, politicians campaign by brandishing their badness-honor in an attempt to outdo their opponent’s credentials with respect to criminal activity, especially in the urban slums of the Jamaican capital of Kingston.75 Poor voters, often mobilized around issues of discrimination or other social gripes, value a candidate’s degree of badness-honor because they seek ways to redress local grievances, especially those related to individual or group status concerns.76 At stake are competing claims over dignity and the respect or status afforded a given community.77

  In ethnically divided Macedonia, research has shown that Albanian politicians have regularly exploited minority nationalist sentiment to gain political support on the basis of their connections to paramilitary groups, bolstered in part by the continuing socioeconomic plight of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia. A deep-seated feeling of exclusion under the prior communist regime further fuels this dynamic. Politicians and criminal organizations have mutually overlapping interests, with the former interested in winning votes and enjoying the spoils of power and the latter concerned with protection.78 A weak, corrupt state where the rule of law is unevenly enforced provides the underlying foundation for this quid pro quo to take place.79