In reserved constituencies, where quotas are in effect, things work somewhat differently (figure 6.4). In reserved constituencies all candidates contesting elections are, by definition, members of the same ethnic group (that is, either SC or ST). Guaranteeing representation for these groups, of course, is the very point of reservations. But the electorate, in contrast, is made up of all eligible, voting-age citizens. While the voters may be a diverse lot, they are compelled to choose from candidates from only one caste or community.
Fixing the ethnic identity of the candidates in this way has a peculiar effect; because all candidates share a common ethnic identity, SC or ST candidates often depend on voters who are not like them (that is, who do not share an ethnic affiliation) in order to win elections. Because all candidates for election are from the reserved group, the voters from these reserved communities are likely to be fragmented—rendering everybody else’s vote both influential and highly sought after. On the flip side, non-SC/ST voters do not have the option of voting for a co-ethnic (“one of their own”), so they must screen and select candidates on some criterion other than ethnicity.
Figure 6.3. Politics, social divisions, and criminality in general constituencies.
Figure 6.4. Politics, social divisions, and criminality in reserved constituencies.
Compared to seats where quotas are not in play, the electoral stakes are lower in reserved constituencies because the ethnic identity of the winner is known ahead of time; no matter what happens, at the end of the day the winner of the election will be someone from the reserved minority group. For all of these reasons, one would expect the salience of social divisions to be weaker in reserved constituencies.
The diminished relevance of social divisions and the preordained identity of the winner weaken incentives for parties to mobilize strictly along ethnic lines; in reserved constituencies, ethnicity is of limited value as a voting cue. As a result, candidates known for their alleged criminal proclivities and whose popularity rests on their comparative advantage in mobilizing on identity lines will have less traction in reserved seats. Anticipating that this is the case, parties are not likely to select such candidates in reserved areas. If a party were to field a criminally suspect candidate who gains strength from his unabashed willingness to cater to the interests of the reserved community, voters from all the other communities might be more inclined to join forces to defeat such a candidate.
Possible Objections
Before proceeding, it is worth considering several possible objections one could raise with this logic. One potential critique is that this argument disregards the multiplicity of discrete caste or tribal (jati) identities that exist within the larger SC/ST headings. “Scheduled Caste” and “Scheduled Tribe” are umbrella groups consisting of many individual jatis, or subgroups. As with most caste groupings, such as “upper caste” or OBC, SCs and STs are internally quite diverse. While this is certainly a valid critique, there is some debate about how salient specific jatis within the larger SC category are in the political realm, given Dalits’ common historical struggle.30
Even if it is the case that jati-based competition is in play, incorporating jatis does not substantively change the analysis for at least three reasons. For starters, emphasizing divisions among SCs/STs is a questionable political strategy for politicians to adopt in reserved constituencies because it only further subdivides the minority vote. A criminal candidate who mobilizes voters from only his own SC/ST jati limits his appeal; the incentives are to cater to the median voter.
Second, a candidate in a reserved constituency could mobilize along jati lines, but he or she is unlikely to be able to have access to the tools necessary to build a minimum winning coalition given the realities of the caste hierarchy. In many instances, candidates have to construct a coalition in order to win an election, which forces them to attract support beyond their own community. Here too there are divergent incentives in open versus reserved seats. In open seats, suspected criminal candidates from the dominant group(s) can use coercion and/or redistribution to add to their core ethnic voter base. Social groups on the bottom rungs of the caste hierarchy will be more vulnerable to such tactics. The situation is likely to be different in reserved seats, where criminally suspect candidates from reserved minority communities will be less able to wield coercion and/or redistribution to win support from dominant groups. Groups higher up on the caste hierarchy, due to their relative wealth and their superior social status, are likely to resist such tactics and be generally unwilling to support candidates who are harder to control or bend to their will.
Finally, it is true that candidates linked to criminality can sometimes gain support from voters who are not co-ethnics due to negative voting. For instance, a low-caste Dalit may vote for an upper-caste Brahmin strongman because he thinks electing a Brahmin is a better outcome than electing a Yadav. In reserved constituencies, negative voting is less relevant because all the candidates are from the same community.31 In a reserved constituency, a Brahmin voter does not have to make the trade-off of supporting a criminal ST candidate to ensure another group he dislikes (or another group he dislikes even more) comes to power because reservation disqualifies anyone else from contesting elections.
Stooges and Sycophants
The notion that reserved constituencies are marked by a unique brand of politics is further bolstered by the common sentiment that candidates in reserved constituencies are often perceived to be “dummy candidates” who appear more interested in currying favor with, and appearing palatable to, the median voter than catering to the interests of their own community.
Kanshi Ram, Mayawati’s mentor and the founder of the pro-Dalit BSP, famously argued that electoral reservation is counterproductive because it allows more advanced castes to coopt Dalit politicians, who in turn become chamchas (sycophants) of dominant groups. By design, he argued, SC candidates contesting reserved seats are forced to cater to the interests of groups other than their own in order to win election. In his words, “a tool, an agent, a stooge or a Chamcha is created to oppose the real, the genuine fighter.”32 Because candidates in reserved constituencies must have broad-based appeal, they are constrained from forcefully representing the group the seat is reserved for.
As the father of India’s constitution and its most famous Dalit leader, B. R. Ambedkar, often reminded people, reservations make the minority a slave to the majority. In a joint electorate, Ambedkar wrote, “The representative of the Untouchables [Dalits] would only be a nominal representative . . . for no Untouchable who did not agree to be a nominee of the Hindus and a tool in their hands could be elected.”33 Indeed, it was for this reason that Ambedkar lobbied vociferously in favor of separate electorates for SCs, in which only SC candidates could stand for office and only SC voters could vote. On this score, Ambedkar eventually lost out to Mahatma Gandhi, who feared separate electorates would damage Indian unity.34
Ram Vilas Paswan, one of India’s most prominent currently serving Dalit MPs, makes a similar distinction between elected officials who act as “representatives of Dalits” and those that are “Dalit Representatives.” For Paswan, the tragedy of reserved constituencies is that Dalit voters are more likely to get the latter: “Thus, elected would be Dalits, but they need not be Dalit Representatives, and have to be the Dalits elected by the dominant caste general voters. Hence, the namesake Dalit Representatives, unless they are basically tall within, and morally strong, had to look for approval of the dominant castes, before they speak or do anything.”35
This sentiment about quotas was corroborated by a conversation I had with a senior official from a major national political party in Bihar in 2010. When I asked the man how his party selected its candidates in reserved constituencies, he laughed and replied, “We pray to God we can find someone who appeals to all segments.”36 Low-caste voters in one assembly constituency in Bihar bound for election complained that all parties had given tickets to relatively unobjectionable Dalit candidates so that t
hey would not alienate other communities. As one voter put it, “Non-Dalit sections [communities] want someone who can be influenced and shaped; they will prefer someone who bends rather than a person who stands up straight.”
The experience of reservation for SCs, in particular, stands in contrast to the experience of the OBCs, the segment located immediately above SCs on the traditional caste hierarchy. Unlike SCs, OBCs have not benefited from ethnic quotas for legislative representation. Some have argued that the political mobilization of certain segments of the OBCs—the Yadavs come to mind—has been affected by this struggle for representation, in a way that has fostered greater acceptance of extralegal methods of political practice.37
Many scholars agree with the sentiment that the system of reservation has hindered the ability of SC and ST politicians to aggressively fight for their respective community’s interests. As Ambedkar and others had pointed out, a system of separate electorates, in contrast, would have been less likely to produce moderate candidates because politicians need only to win the votes of their own communities to succeed electorally.38
The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot writes that Dalit politicians representing reserved constituencies have historically achieved little on behalf of their Dalit constituents because “the reservation system provided hardly any incentive for Scheduled Caste MPs or MLAs to foster the political consciousness of their caste fellows since they depended upon other voters to sustain their careers.”39 Two decades earlier, legal scholar Marc Galanter commented that the system of legislative reservations and the need to appeal to constituencies made up “overwhelmingly of others” tended to produce “compliant and accommodating leaders rather than forceful articulators of the interests of these groups.”40 One scholar interviewed a Scheduled Caste politician from Uttar Pradesh who bemoaned the moderating pressures of the reservation system, stating, “I have to work for all, for the majority of the voters, how would I otherwise win the election?”41
This insight perhaps provides an explanation for why many recent empirical analyses have detected no significant impacts of Dalit reservation on various measures of socioeconomic development or redistribution favoring Dalits. For instance, an exhaustive study by the political scientist Francesca Jensenius found that three decades of Dalit reservations had no discernible impact on economic development outcomes of Dalits residing in constituencies reserved for them.42 A few earlier studies had detected positive gains from reservation, but these focused primarily on spending priorities or indicators measured at the village level rather than at the level of state or national electoral constituencies.43 Of course, this is not to say that reservation has not produced any tangible improvements for reserved groups. An important new study, for instance, has found that reservations have subtly changed Dalits’ views of themselves as well as popular perceptions of Dalits writ large.44
However, the primary take-away, as far as crime in politics is concerned, is that to the extent candidates under criminal scrutiny win support by advocating forcefully—even ruthlessly—for their narrow sectarian interests, one should see less criminality in reserved constituencies due to the need to appeal to a broader swath of voters.
EVIDENCE FROM QUOTAS
A more systematic review of available data, which goes beyond the example of the BSP described at the start of this chapter, reveals a similar pattern of criminality in reserved versus open seats. Here I focus on state elections for a few reasons, not least of which is the fact that it vastly enlarges the number of observations to study given that there are 30 elected state assemblies in India.45
Across all state assembly constituencies for which I have data between 2003 and 2009, 35 percent contain at least one candidate facing at least one serious criminal case. But there is a considerable amount of variation across constituency types. Among unreserved constituencies, 40 percent feature candidates who face serious criminal cases, yet only 27 percent of SC constituencies and 18 percent of ST constituencies claim this distinction (see figure 6.5). On average, if one uses more sophisticated multiple regression techniques and controls for many other possible confounding factors, it appears that reservation is associated with a 14 to 15 percent decrease in the likelihood a candidate facing at least one serious case stands for election.46 The decrease is marginally greater for SC, as compared to ST, reserved seats.
Although these differences are significant, it is possible that criminality is lower in reserved areas not because of political incentives—as I have argued—but due to other factors. For instance, one could argue that SCs or STs might be less prone to engage in criminal conduct for cultural, sociological, socioeconomic, or other reasons. If that were the case, then the idea that politicians from reserved communities are less likely to be associated with criminality may not be entirely surprising.
Figure 6.5. Share of state assembly constituencies, by reservation status, featuring candidates with pending serious criminal cases, 2003–9. Legislative seats are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Scheduled Castes (SC); all other seats are unreserved or general (GEN) seats. (Author’s calculations based on affidavits submitted to the Election Commission of India)
Data from India’s Home Ministry, however, suggest that there is no evidence that SCs and STs are underrepresented among the criminal population at large. If one looks at the caste breakdown of convicts and those who are in jail while under trial, SCs/STs are proportionally represented among India’s criminal population in the vast majority of states.47
A second possibility is that parties have different propensities for fielding SC/ST candidates, in which case partisan preferences for certain types of candidates could be the ultimate source of the variation. Parties that field candidates in reserved constituencies, for various reasons, may not be predisposed to running individuals with criminal backgrounds. This does not turn out to be the case. The top six parties that field the largest number of candidates in unreserved constituencies are largely the same as those that field the most candidates in reserved constituencies. Although the same parties are among the most active in each constituency category, they are clearly pursuing different strategies in reserved (versus open) constituencies—in line with the example of the BSP mentioned at the start of this chapter (figure 6.6). All parties are less likely to field candidates facing serious cases in reserved constituencies.
Figure 6.6. Party nomination of state assembly candidates with pending serious criminal cases, by reservation status, 2003–9. Parties graphed are: Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP), Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Samajwadi Party (SP), Indian National Congress (INC), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), and Independents (IND). Legislative seats are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Scheduled Castes (SC); all other seats are unreserved or general (GEN) seats. (Author’s calculations based on affidavits submitted to the Election Commission of India)
Spurious or Significant?
Although differential propensities for criminality or partisan preferences do not explain the differences in reserved constituencies when it comes to criminality, it is possible that there are still other factors that explain the divergence. One concern about the analysis thus far is that it might be difficult to compare areas that are reserved to those that are not. Reservations are allocated to electoral districts with relatively large shares of SC or ST populations, and a large literature has documented the myriad ways in which these communities have lagged behind the majority of the Indian population on key socioeconomic indicators.48 In social science parlance, reservations are endogenous, or determined by internal characteristics, rather than chosen at random.
Because reservation is not chosen by lottery, there are a host of reasons why reserved constituencies might systematically differ from unreserved constituencies on socioeconomic indicators or along other important dimensions. These factors, in turn, could influence the composition of the political class. For instance, if the overall level of wealth is lower in reserved areas, candidates who wish to engage in rent- seeking onc
e in office might be less motivated to contest elections there. Candidates interesting in looting the state might be more inclined to contest elections in constituencies where the financial rewards of office are more significant. If this were the case, it would be hard to determine whether the lower levels of criminality observed in reserved constituencies are due to the way in which quotas impact ethnic politics or the fact that reserved areas simply have a different socioeconomic or cultural makeup that makes candidates with criminal reputations less attractive.
Redistricting
At the end of the day, however, reservation per se is not really what is important; it is what reservation does to the practice of identity politics that matters for criminality. Do reservations reduce the salience of ethnically motivated political divisions, thereby weakening the appeal of candidates with criminal records? Or is there some other variable, unique to reserved constituencies, that is driving the differences in electoral outcomes. Fortunately, there are ways of resolving this dispute that will help remove doubts about the logic sketched out here. The process of determining which seats are reserved (and which are not) has a few idiosyncrasies researchers can exploit to better isolate the links between criminality and politics.
The Indian Constitution stipulates that upon the completion of each census (conducted once every decade), a competent authority determined by Parliament should readjust electoral boundaries and the allocation and reservation of seats. Since independence, Parliament has authorized the convening of an independent “Delimitation Commission” four times in its history: 1952, 1963, 1973, and 2002. The most recent Delimitation Commission was finally constituted in 2002 after a gap of many years, a product of legislative wrangling over the politically sensitive act of redrawing of electoral boundaries. In 2007, the commission completed its work of redrawing India’s legislative constituencies to take into account demographic changes emerging from the 2001 census; its orders came into force in May 2008.
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