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 pledge 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 in replete with evidence of politicians using “antisocial” or “lumpen” elements in the earliest elections following independence. At some point, 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.

A closer examination suggests there were two sets of factors responsible for injecting a supply of criminals in to 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 behaviour 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 instructions, or what one scholar has called a “crisis of governability.”

All of those 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.

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 criminals 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 unsavoury 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 the 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.

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 violent 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.”

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 leaders 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.

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. “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.” 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.”

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.

Excerpted with permission from When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, by Milan Vaishnav (Harper Collins, Rs 799).