When Crime Pays

by Milan Vaishnav

  Over the next several decades, booth capturing evolved to encompass all manner of electoral malpractice and trickery. Such practices included stuffing ballot boxes, employing violence to intimidate voters, locating polling booths in a candidate’s stronghold, or simply dividing up control of the booths among rival factions. For instance, booth capturing did not always entail, nor can it be easily reduced to, the use of force. When booth capturing occurred peacefully, typically a dominant caste group (or a group vying for dominance) would prevent voters from rival groups from voting, manage police and polling booth agents, or vote on behalf of disenfranchised voters.42

  The incentive for the criminals was not just monetary, in terms of payments from politicians and parties to do their bidding; it was also about self-preservation. In exchange for doing the politician’s dirty work, criminals received protection from the state and a direct line to state patronage in terms of contracts, tenders, and giveaways.43 This quid pro quo preserved an equilibrium in which all parties stood to gain, but it was a delicate balancing act—one vulnerable to political shocks.

  The Congress System Breaks Down

  During the era of Congress hegemony, politicians were firmly in the driver’s seat; criminals were the hired guns, and they rarely stood for elections themselves. As electoral competition stiffened and the Congress Party’s organizational foundations began to deteriorate, this dalliance started to spread to other parties.

  The mid-1960s were a tumultuous period for the Congress, thanks to the disastrous rout India suffered at the hands of China in the 1962 war, ongoing economic woes and concerns over corruption, and the deaths, in quick succession, of Prime Ministers Jawarhalal Nehru in 1964 and Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966. In the wake of Shastri’s death, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, assumed the prime ministership. Although Indira would come to be remembered as an authoritative, even authoritarian leader, at the time she was perceived to be a figurehead who could be remote-controlled by a group of Congress state bosses (collectively known as the “Syndicate”). In the minds of Congress insiders, Indira was a placeholder—a politician who would appeal to the masses and could capitalize on Nehru’s personal legacy but who ultimately would defer to the wishes of the Syndicate on most matters of politics and policy.

  It was in this context that Congress suffered a devastating series of political defeats in the states in 1967. While electoral challenges to Congress began much earlier in southern India, northern India was still seen as its impregnable citadel. That perception changed in 1967, as Congress was thrown out of office for the first time in the north Indian heartland states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and sustained losses in West Bengal and the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. By July 1967 two-thirds of the country no longer lived under Congress Party rule.44 In the national election held that year, Congress too suffered a serious setback. Having won 361 out of 494 seats in the 1962 election, Congress won just 283 out of 520 seats in 1967.

  One consequence of the weakening of the Congress machine was a rapid increase in the exercise of sheer political opportunism in the form of political defections—politicians deserting one party to join another.45 According to one estimate, there were 542 cases of defections between India’s first and fourth general elections; in one year alone (1967), more than 438 MLAs (state legislators) defected from one party or another.46 As a result of this political promiscuity, 32 state governments fell between 1967 and 1971 and as many as half of India’s MLAs had changed party affiliations at least once by March 1971. On average, at least one politician changed parties each day and one government fell each month.47

  The second consequence of a weakened Congress was the influx of individuals connected to criminality into mainstream electoral politics. The resort to criminality was spurred on not just by the fracturing of the vaunted Congress system but also by the widespread organizational decay in the political arena. James Manor, for example, has argued that politicians of all stripes recruited criminals during this period because they could not adequately maintain transactional links to important social groups. As the efficacy of traditional tactics of top-down control gradually diminished, parties struggled to mediate citizen demands in ways that satisfied the desires of voters. With the formal party system exhibiting signs of strain, space opened up for a new set of actors—namely, local power brokers who were “professional managers” or, simply, fixers—to fill the vacuum. As Rajni Kothari noted, this change in the prevailing political order was no freak accident, but the result of sustained institutional deterioration.48

  Organizational Decline of Parties

  Echoing Samuel Huntington’s argument about modernization, Manor further disaggregates the decay into two distinct components: the growing organizational weakness in party structures, and the “demand overload” faced by parties in the face of intense social mobilization and an “awakening” on the part of the lower castes.49

  The Congress Party’s internal organization, which had yielded a string of electoral victories, showed significant signs of strain as genuine multiparty competition intensified and its revered political leadership either passed away or struck out on their own. The party’s dominance heavily relied on its ability to distribute the resources it accumulated by controlling the state to its varied constituencies in return for political fealty.50 As its organizational coherence faded, the party’s distributional ability eroded as well. Organizational considerations, intraparty democracy, and party loyalty fell victim to political expediency and “winnability” in a desperate attempt by Congress to maintain its grip on power. As a consequence, Congress increasingly relied on coercive or criminal elements to project some semblance of institutional authority and to prevent challenges from below. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the Congress devolved into a “mercenary organization.”51

  The Congress apparatus, which operated like a well-oiled machine in the years after independence, was badly in need of a tune-up if not an outright overhaul. As the organization foundered, Indira Gandhi ignored calls to right the ship and instead chose to plow ahead. Corruption, internal factionalism, and disputes—both ideological and identity based—gradually came to dominate party affairs, and the internal procedures the party had deployed skillfully in the past to diffuse such tension were no longer up to the task under its new leadership.52

  While the indiscipline and internal factionalism within the Congress has been well documented,53 these pathologies were further exacerbated by a leadership, especially during Indira’s rule, that sacrificed party building for short-term political expediency. In seeking to establish direct contact with the masses via a populist electoral strategy, Gandhi saw little need to invest in a robust party organization. The resultant decline in party structures led to the “indiscriminate recruitment of dubious activists in the quest for power.”54

  But what was true of Congress could also apply to the emergent opposition, which also demonstrated ample “incapacity to develop solid party structures.”55 Parties across the board grew increasingly detached from concerns of the common man and overly reliant on a single charismatic leader. Of this affliction, scholar K. C. Suri writes: “There cannot be any ‘number two’ in the party. . . . There is very little scope for disagreement with, or criticism against the party boss. . . . They are like modern princes.”56 Such organizational shortcomings were not unique to Congress but were endemic across the political spectrum.

  The second ingredient that contributed to the organizational decline of political parties was the political awakening experienced by those at the bottom of the social pyramid.57 In India’s first electoral system, Congress had impressively managed to defuse the full expression of ethnic and caste identity in politics through its accommodationist proclivities, even though the party itself was thoroughly dominated by individuals belonging to the elite castes. Although the social awakening of the lower castes occurred at different times in different parts of the country, the 1960s witnessed the widespread assertion of the lower c
astes for greater political voice. This agitation was greatest among the middle peasants (mainly OBCs), many of whom had benefited from land reforms. These groups saw a yawning gap between the economic power they had accumulated since 1947 and that of their political representation.58 Resentful of this chasm, they were no longer willing to have their “superiors”—the upper castes and the erstwhile landed elites—dictate for whom they should cast their vote.

  To some degree, it was only a matter of time before the hodgepodge social coalition underpinning Congress began to sag under the weight of its internal contradictions. Unfortunately, new forms of (largely identity-based) social mobilization, used by both Congress and new electoral competitors, were motivated by short-term political benefits and control over state power rather than programmatic politics. As political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta notes, “such mobilizations, instead of throwing up genuine well-organized and disciplined grass roots movements, usually throw up demagogues,” resulting in a decline in the quality of political representation.59

  From the perspective of democratic inclusion, the broadening of political participation and the diffusion of political power was obviously a positive trend. But the newfound assertiveness of previously marginalized communities occasionally morphed into declining deference to established authority structures (which, to be fair, often used repressive tactics) and a willingness to resort to extralegal means in the pursuit of social justice.

  Doubling Down on Criminal Elements

  The organizational shortcomings exhibited by Congress and rising social assertiveness opened the floodgates to the forging of closer linkages between politicians and criminals. As journalist Prem Shankar Jha writes of Congress, “To win elections party leaders began to rely more and more on musclemen who would physically ‘capture’ voting booths, stuff the ballot boxes with ballot papers stamped in favour of the candidate who had employed them, intimidate entire caste and community groups, and physically prevent them from going to the polling booth to cast their vote.”60

  Opposition parties resorted to similar strategies in order to counter Congress and break through the barriers that stood between them and state power. Non-Congress opposition parties, often representing lower-caste interests that felt increasingly disenfranchised, were compelled to fight fire with fire, thus further entrenching the competitive recourse to criminality in the political firmament.

  The ECI noted in its official report on the 1967 election that the tension that existed prior to the election, involving occasional bursts of violence, was unprecedented in the fifteen years since India’s first national election. After relatively calm polls in 1962, the ECI documented violence in several states five years later, which prompted re-polls to be called in several instances. One independent analysis found 474 cases of reported violence in the two months leading up to elections.61 Bihar alone accounted for around one-fifth of all election violence. While this tally was head and shoulders above the number of incidents documented elsewhere, numerous other states recorded significant amounts of election-related unrest, from Andhra Pradesh and Assam to Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.62 Beyond violence, there is evidence other forms of malfeasance were also on the rise. In Kerala, the commission reported a massive increase in the number of rejected ballot papers—an outcome consistent with rigging—for mysterious reasons that it admitted were “not easy to spot.”63

  In subsequent state elections held in 1968, the commission documented a “comparatively large number of complaints about intimidation and coercion” from the Hindi belt states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the latter of which saw violence sparked by “turbulent mobs” occurring around polling booths.64 Many analysts point to intensifying electoral violence in the late 1960s as an important inflection point. To explain the changes in, and consolidation of, criminal and political power, one political analyst wrote that following Bihar’s assembly election in 1969 winning elections now meant that “the ballot must be backed by the bullet.”65

  DEINSTITUTIONALIZED DEMOCRACY

  Following the electoral setback of 1967, simmering tensions within the Congress Party apparatus eventually boiled over. There was tremendous dissension within the leadership ranks as to how the party could right itself after its series of electoral debacles in order to regain its past glory. The rift between the Syndicate and Indira Gandhi further deepened because Indira believed that the prime minister, not the party, should direct the policies of the government. To make matters worse, the two sides also disagreed vehemently as to the content of those very policies, with a left-right ideological disagreement coloring the party’s internal deliberations.66

  These internal disagreements prompted a major split in the Congress Party in 1969. In the aftermath of this division, Indira Gandhi championed a new kind of plebiscitary politics that minimized the role of the party apparatus and established direct links between herself and the voter. After winning a slender majority in 1967 while suffering setbacks and disaffection in several states across the country, Gandhi faced an uphill battle in the 1971 general election. In fact, the 1971 election was actually supposed to be held the following year in 1972; Gandhi called early elections in an effort to nationalize the poll and break the link between state and national elections, which would allow her to minimize the relative influence of state and local factors in the minds of voters. By de-linking state and national elections, Gandhi “was, in effect, asking voters to put aside the performance of state MLAs and even of the individual MPs in serving their constituencies and to vote instead on the basis of national issues.”67 Holding separate elections would also have the effect of vastly increasing the cost of elections (which is discussed in greater detail below).

  By lurching markedly to the left in terms of economic policy (campaigning famously on a pledge of garibi hatao, or “abolish poverty”) and brandishing personalistic appeals (later pithily summed up by Devakanta Barua’s quip, “Indira is India and India is Indira”), Gandhi led Congress to a massive victory in 1971. The electoral landslide further emboldened her efforts to convert the party into a cult of personality. In the aftermath of the election, Gandhi acted swiftly and confidently to consolidate her power. For instance, she moved to ensure that Congress state leaders would no longer be selected on the basis of grassroots support, but rather on their personal loyalty to her.68 Traditionally, following elections in which Congress emerged victorious, each state unit of the Congress Party would propose the name of its chosen chief minister; after 1971, state units simply deferred to the wishes of the “high command,” shorthand for Indira herself. In the five years between March 1972 and March 1977, Gandhi dismissed as many as fourteen chief ministers, including twelve from her own party.69 To facilitate this meddling, Indira Gandhi formally suspended internal elections within the Congress.70

  In terms of its relations with the states, the Congress-led central government adopted a much more interventionist stance in the 1970s. The Congress under Indira cunningly worked to topple opposition governments, a strategy that further subverted democratic institutions.71 Under Article 356 of the constitution, the center has the authority to suspend the rule of state governments in exceptional circumstances (such as the collapse of a coalition government) and impose central rule, known as “President’s Rule.” Under Indira Gandhi, the Congress Party used this provision with abandon in order to shape local political outcomes.72 In the first fifteen years of the republic (1952–67), the center invoked Article 356 just ten times. In the subsequent nine years from 1968 to 1976, it imposed President’s Rule twenty-five times (figure 3.2).73

  Figure 3.2. Frequency of President’s Rule (Article 356), 1952–2009. (Data from Anoop Sadanandan, “Bridling Central Tyranny in India,” Asian Survey 52, no. 2 [March/April 2012]: 247–69)

  Repeated central intervention and the blatant disregard for states’ rights would, among other things, plant the seeds for the separatist violence and disorder that India would witness later on in several crucial states.

  Entren
ched Muscle Power

  In a context of increasingly personal rule and mounting social and political tension, the patterns of employing muscle power in elections, which blossomed in the 1960s, became more entrenched in the following decade. According to the Election Commission, the 1971 general election witnessed a significant amount of turbulence. The commission had to order fresh polls in 66 cases where open booth capturing was detected, primarily in Bihar but also in Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh. The geographic variation should dispel the popular perception that the practice of criminals working hand in glove with politicians was exclusively a Hindi belt phenomenon.

  Similar developments were recorded in the eastern state of West Bengal. The 1967 state election in Bengal brought to power a coalition government headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—or CPI(M)—only to be dismissed shortly thereafter by the Congress central government. When fresh elections were called in 1969, the CPI(M) again formed the government, only to be ousted once again by Congress in cahoots with defectors from the ruling coalition.

  In both the 1971 general election and the 1972 state election, West Bengal witnessed large-scale political thuggery (often referred to as goondagiri in Hindi).74 Indeed, although the ECI singled out political violence in Bihar, the minister of state in the Home Ministry K. C. Pant told Parliament in April 1971 that Bengal actually topped the list of electoral violence (1,027 discrete incidents, or nearly half of the national total by the ministry’s count). Bihar, according to Pant, clocked in at third, “bested” by Tamil Nadu and followed closely by Andhra Pradesh.75