And in India’s neighbor and rival to the west, Pakistan, there is evidence of a complex interplay between crime and politics, especially in the southern port city of Karachi, the country’s largest metropolis. There, stubborn ethnic cleavages dating back to the partition of the subcontinent have led most major political parties to incorporate criminal elements, who in turn use their criminality to protect the interests of warring ethnic factions.80 According to a study by journalist Huma Yusuf, the root of the ethnic conflict has to do with growing tensions between Indian migrants (known as mohajirs), who settled in Pakistan, and ethnic Pashtuns, who moved to the city from the country’s northwest. Political parties representing the two groups, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and Awami National Party, respectively, sponsored politicians with criminal or extralegal reputations in order to cater to their own constituencies as well as offer a coercive deterrent against the other. The situation became even more complex as the Pakistan People’s Party, with a strong base in rural Sindh province, began mobilizing ethnic Sindhis and Balochis in a similar fashion.81
Although the two countries’ political trajectories could not be more different in many respects, the underlying drivers of criminality in the politics of India and Pakistan appear quite similar. In both South Asian nations, a growing crisis of governance, deteriorating law and order, sharp ethnic tensions linked to changing social hierarchies, and growing public sector–controlled rents have fostered a marriage between crime and politics. In Pakistan’s case, terrorism and extremist violence have provided an additional layer to the conflict.82
CONTINGENT FACTORS
Of course, the precise balance of forces between crime and politics will range considerably from country to country. Here, political competition—coupled with some degree of historical contingency—can affect the calculus of criminals to directly intervene in day-to-day electoral politics.
Political Competition
Scanning across these examples, there is clearly a difference between criminals who double as politicians and politicians who are associated (in some cases, tangentially) with criminals. While in both cases there is an alleged engagement with illegal activity, the embodiment of both avatars in the same individual is striking. Why this melding together occurs in India but not in several other cases is an interesting question.
Clearly, the extent of electoral competition plays a role in shaping the form criminality takes. Before the seismic shifts in the competitiveness of Indian politics occurred and before the era of Congress hegemony came to an end, there was some degree of separation between the “politician” and the “criminal.” That dividing line became blurred with the onslaught of intense political contestation and fragmentation, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. In other settings, in the presence of the weak rule of law and strong social divisions—but absent intense competition—it is possible that criminals could refrain from direct political engagement, as they did in previous eras of Indian politics. In this latter equilibrium one is much more likely to observe some variant of the “godfather” syndrome, whereby powerful and shadowy players tied to illegal activity exert their influence by backing candidates rather than becoming candidates themselves.
In Nigeria, for example, one author writes of the transition some godfathers have undergone from “brokers” to “patrons.” As brokers, godfathers were essentially middlemen, mediating relations between political parties/politicians and voters. In places where politics was characterized by high levels of uncertainty, godfathers assumed a more direct role in electoral politics, either standing for election themselves or capturing the party machinery to impose their will.83 This process appears similar to the “vertical integration” criminals in India underwent, described in Chapter 3.
In Jamaica, although politicians profit from their connections to local dons, there is often a separation between the criminals and the politicians. Here too, competition seems to be a prime reason. Kingston’s gangster politics is oriented around a set of “garrison” constituencies, where the entire community votes en bloc for a particular political party. These garrisons are strongholds of local dons, who exert strong hierarchical control over the political allegiance of the community. Although there is robust competition across constituencies, in areas where gangs have established strongholds competition is limited, and, hence, the dons can easily contract with their preferred politician without having to directly engage in electoral politics.84
Historical Legacies
Although they are difficult to quantify, a country’s unique historical legacies also influence the crime-politics nexus in powerful ways. In India, for instance, the image of a politician courting arrest or even incarceration was an intrinsic part of the country’s nationalist struggle and historical self-narrative. Indeed, the political act of courting arrest as a method of civil disobedience even has its own nomenclature: jail bharo (fill the jails).85 Therefore, on one hand, the fusion of politician and so-called criminal is considered culturally acceptable in India. But, on the other hand, it seems excessive to suggest that ordinary voters cannot differentiate between Jawaharlal Nehru and Pappu Yadav, both of whom served jail time but under very different circumstances.
With regard to criminality, perhaps more powerful than the historical legacy of the independence struggle is the legacy of the zamindar. During the colonial era, large swathes of India were exposed to local control by zamindars, who functioned not only as landlords in the feudal sense but also doubled as the local state in many ways.86 This assumption of the state’s responsibilities meant that the landlord wielded instruments of violence and coercion in the way police and law enforcement might in a modern state.87
Although India abolished the zamindari system after independence, it never fully disappeared. Rather, it was displaced for an alternative form of governance: rule of the strongman. This strongman may not have borne any formal relation to land tenure arrangements or agrarian relations, but much like the zamindar of yesteryear, he was a socially embedded figure who commanded local authority.88 The legacy of zamindari rule is felt in India even today. An influential study in 2005 found that decades after zamindari abolition, districts that were previously under zamindari control exhibited worse developmental outcomes than parts of India where land revenue was directly imposed on cultivators, as opposed to through landlords or middlemen (known as the ryotwari system).89
Historical contingencies have played a role in other contexts where politics and crime go hand in hand. For instance, research on the Philippines has shown that the subordination of the local state to elected leaders in the colonial era in a context of “primitive capitalist accumulation” led to the emergence and persistence of “bossism” in local politics. This unique pattern of state formation a century ago is arguably responsible for the color of electoral politics the island nation enjoys today.90
Comparative research has also asked why the rule of law in Jamaica looks so different from the rule of law in Barbados, another Caribbean island nation with similar historical and socioeconomic attributes at the time of independence. This work has shown that variation in the race-class correlation, the role of religion, and notions of cultural autonomy had differential impacts on how citizens viewed the legitimacy of the state. In Jamaica, where these variables combined to produce misgivings about the state’s legitimacy, the transition to democracy institutionalized a violent system of patronage politics. In Barbados, the opposite occurred; the move to universal suffrage was accompanied by a less corrupt brand of politics, which helped consolidate the rule of law.91
MAJOR IMPLICATIONS
Now it is time to take yet another step back to examine the macro picture and ask: how does the notion of a “market for criminals” shape larger understandings about democracy, accountability, representation, and the role of information? I would stipulate that there are five big-picture lessons one can draw.
Political Finance
A major implication of the book is that private wealth is fa
st becoming a requirement of gaining entry into electoral politics. The skyrocketing cost of elections is, of course, a phenomenon with relevance far beyond India’s borders. It is nearly impossible to read of a truly democratic election occurring anywhere in the world without encountering stories about how expensive the democratic process has become.
There is widespread recognition that democratic politics cannot function without healthy infusions of money to finance campaigns, pay for advertisements, employ party workers, and so on. But what is less understood is the manner in which the imperative to raise money is shaping the talent pool for political office. Most of the existing studies of political finance focus on the developed world and/or examine the impact of money on political or policy outcomes. This has left two major gaps in our knowledge.
The first is that we know very little about the role money is playing in the political systems of the developing world. Clearly, a paucity of data is partially to blame for this; reporting requirements and data transparency are much weaker outside of the advanced industrial democracies. Although detailed data are still hard to come by, at least one recent initiative has created a scorecard for 54 countries around the world using 50 different indicators from public funding to reporting requirements, monitoring, and enforcement.92
The second is that a focus on outcomes has inadvertently drawn attention away from how money shapes who gets into politics in the first place. And yet, there is a strong case to be made that who gets elected has a strong impact on what policies government pursues. In India, the quest for riches has seriously narrowed the talent pool from which parties select candidates. After accounting for businessmen, celebrities, criminals and dynasts, there is very little room for ordinary citizens to get their foot in the door. There is mounting evidence from the developed world, and a handful of studies from the developing world, that show there is a clear “elite bias” among democratically elected representatives.93 This skewed representation, in turn, is having an impact on the policies representatives pursue once in office. An important study of the United States, for instance, has found that the socioeconomic profiles of elected legislators have a meaningful impact on how these representatives perceive policy issues as well as how they choose to act on them once in office.94
Bad Politicians and Accountability
From the standpoint of democracy and its many virtues, the intimacy of crime and democratic politics confounds many commonly accepted notions. After all, many of the leading lights from political science and political philosophy who have written eloquently about democracy over the past several centuries suggest that what distinguishes democracy from nondemocracy is that the former engenders accountability because elections offer citizens the opportunity to sanction their representatives at regular intervals. This mechanism is at the heart of the democratic project and is thought to provide the carrot and the stick by which “bad” politicians can be weeded out and “good” politicians ushered in.
Later scholars came to the realization that democracy did not always work as advertised. On the contrary, they postulated that democracy could facilitate accountability only when voters participating in democratic processes had access to information about the behavior of their representatives. Armed with this information, voters could then make rational decisions on whether to reelect or reject their incumbent politician, thus facilitating true accountability (figure 8.1).
Based on this reasoning, it is no surprise that most studies of wayward lawmakers contain an assumption that the political success of bad politicians in democratic countries is inherently symptomatic of a breakdown in the chain of democratic accountability. This is taken as a given; an alternative scenario in which bad politicians and accountability might coexist is typically not envisioned.
In some instances, some scholars actually begin with this premise and then work in reverse. Once the accountability failure is identified, scholars work backwards to identify the primary cause. In many instances, information is often believed to be at the heart of this breakdown—the missing ingredient which, when absent, creates the space for bad politicians to creep in under the cover of darkness. This process of reverse induction (figure 8.2) is more likely subliminal than intentional.
Whichever causal logic is pursued—that depicted in figure 8.1 or figure 8.2—the ignorant voter thesis is a compelling narrative and has been shown to be true in a great many cases. But it is not a universal truth. Indeed, importing this logic to the puzzle of India’s criminal politicians can be deeply problematic. Under certain conditions, malfeasant politicians and accountability can in fact be compatible. Where some scholars go astray is in assuming away the possibility that connections to illegal behavior can sometimes be an asset, rather than a liability, for politicians in consolidated democracies. This turns the standard logic on its head: well-informed voters may, in fact, have good reasons to lend their support to bad politicians, thus creating a victory for democratic accountability (figure 8.3). Granted, of course, the ensuing form of democratic accountability is partial, imperfect, and flies against many common normative conceptions. Furthermore, it is not without its adverse side effects. Yet it offers a corrective to the narrative that voters, and parties, are saddled with malfeasant politicians. To the contrary, they might have rational, affirmative reasons to give them support.
Figure 8.1. Bad politicians and accountability: standard view.
Figure 8.2. Bad politicians and accountability: reverse induction.
Figure 8.3. Bad politicians and accountability: revisionist view.
Limits to Transparency
A third implication is that there are limits to what greater transparency and openness on their own can deliver in terms of cleaning up politics. Just as many analysts often move too quickly in assuming that the coexistence of criminal lawmakers and democracy is representative of serious accountability failures, they often move too hastily in placing the blame on information asymmetries for those perceived failures.
Over the past decade, a consensus has formed among social scientists and development practitioners postulating that citizens’ access to a free flow of information on government performance is vital for improving governance outcomes.95 This book is a contribution to a growing literature that suggests there are reasons to be skeptical about the “information consensus.” For instance, a spate of recent research studies has shown that providing information without making corresponding investments in collective action capacity; offering voters plausible, tangible alternatives; or addressing concerns about the credibility, specificity, and accessibility of the information provided often does little good.96
The idea that under certain conditions a candidate’s criminality can serve as a positive, informative cue is at odds with the oft-repeated assertion that voters “hold their noses” and vote for crooks or, in other words, trade probity for competence. If criminality is a positive, informative cue, voters are not necessarily trading probity for competence, but they might actually be rewarding a lack of probity because this attribute (to their mind) connotes competence. This is a subtle, but important, difference.
Status Concerns
A fourth implication is that identity considerations linked to status matter in politics, both in terms of influencing who gets elected as well as how representatives behave. For many decades, scholars of politics did not take seriously the fact that the identity of politicians played much of a role, either in terms of getting elected or in terms of influencing policy once in office. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, the prevailing wisdom espoused a rather mechanistic view of how politics operates. In any given election, there would be multiple candidates in the fray and the candidate who best represented the preferences of the median voter would emerge victorious. This “median voter” model of politics became the standard paradigm for studying how politicians won election, but the identity of the politician (his or her gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on) was largely irrelevant.97
Over time, of course,
this way of thinking became passé. There was a growing recognition that the identity and policy preferences of politicians were, in fact, intrinsic to establishing their credibility.98 In this book I incorporate this realization into the exploration of why corrupt and criminal politicians thrive in democratic settings. Whereas previous scholars have made the connection between parochial politics and malfeasance, they have not provided a framework for understanding how that malfeasance is not simply incidental to status concerns among voters but is in fact intrinsic to them.99
To be sure, there is a debate over this issue, with some scholars arguing that voters do not prefer criminal candidates; when suspected criminals win election, it is because voters either place more weight on ethnicity than probity or allow ethnic biases to shape their perceptions of candidate quality.100 Although not the last word in this debate, the argument presented here provides a compelling logic for why a criminal record might provide an additional boost to candidates, above and beyond their ethnic background. It also helps explain the puzzle of why these candidates often succeed—even in places where the winner shares the same ethnic background as other “clean” candidates in the race.
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