Book review: Milan Vaishnav,When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics

In this book, an expansion of his doctoral thesis, Milan Vaishnav describes and analyses one of the most commonly discussed yet least understood phenomena in Indian politics: the great number of elected representatives who have been charged with serious crimes, a phenomenon also known as the criminalization of politics. While the book loses some of the statistical richness that was contained in the thesis, it is an original and thought-provoking account that is reasonably accessible to a wide range of readers both in and outside of the academy.

Vaishnav introduces this ambitious research agenda with a series of rhetorical questions. Why would individuals notorious for having committed serious crimes contest elections? Why do political parties select such candidates? And why would voters opt preferentially for criminally tainted candidates?

Vaishnav’s answer makes use of a market analogy, in which parties, voters and candidates meet in a competitive political sphere to trade tickets, votes and services. Candidates who have faced criminal charges place themselves at the disposal of parties, which seek to tap their resources and ability to mobilize votes. Candidates also proffer themselves to voters, who seek to elect representatives who can act as effective mediators between themselves and a variety of institutions, both public and private, that oversee the local or regional distribution of resources. Thus, the supply of criminal candidates by political parties meets the voters’ demands, as these three groups of actors all work in the pursuit of self-interest (p. 18). In so doing, Vaishnav discards several misconceptions regarding the criminalization of politics, such as the idea that voters could somehow have been misled—through misinformation or lack of information—or coerced—through intimidation and violence—to vote for criminal candidates.

However, the true strength of the book lies primarily in its empirical base, a comprehensive and critical analysis of the criminal charges levied against nearly every candidate who ran for office in all 35 state elections held in India between 2003 and 2009 and the three general elections held since 2004. Vaishnav dissects the affidavits of thousands of candidates across India to determine statistically that, ‘even beyond the impact of money, alleged criminality seems to provide an added bonus to candidates’ electoral fortunes’ (p. 153). Throughout his analysis, Vaishnav includes the appropriate caveats to such data-driven methods and skilfully addresses the counter-arguments that could be advanced against his data and his treatment of the data.

The second strength of the book comes from the strong, original argument that the importance of criminality in determining the outcome of local political contests increases when social cleavages— particularly caste divisions—are more salient. The more parties are incentivized to mobilize on ethnic lines (when there is competition locally between several castes), the greater the motivation they have to nominate criminally tainted candidates (p. 214). This helps justify viewing criminality as a form of competitive advantage in Indian electoral politics.

While the book has a wealth of qualitative observations, drawn from Vaishnav’s extensive fieldwork, the material collected aims largely at confirming the author’s statistical findings. Little effort is made to connect criminality with other variables undergirding the candidate strength in Indian elections, or what is often referred to as the ‘winnability’ of the candidate. Recent anthropological contributions to the study of criminalization of politics in India (briefly mentioned in the book) have insisted on the symbolic and performative aspects of electoral politics, where the effectiveness of a candidate is conveyed through a grammar that interweaves eloquence, heroic references and masculine sartorial choices, body language and attitudes. As Vaishnav recognizes it himself, muscular politics is only one register of many that candidates play with to impress their credibility on voters, one register that operates in conjunction with other factors. The social legitimacy of criminal politicians derives from this conjunction of registers and factors, rather than on their criminal reputation alone.

Recent fieldwork conducted by Rajkamal Singh in Uttar Pradesh reveals that personal reputation— of generosity, accessibility and political accountability—tends to determine whether other ‘objective’ criteria of ‘winnability’—money and muscle—will operate. Such an approach helps understand why many criminals and criminal politicians also lose elections, and why the relationship between candidates and voters is not purely transactional (this is an external critique, which does not question the coherence of Vaishnav’s overall argument).

The fallout related to Atique Ahmed’s political career, mentioned in the book’s introduction, is a case is point. A five-time MLA from Allahabad West and the undisputed don of the Allahabad crime scene through the 1990s, Ahmad built an image of an effective and benevolent politician through a mix of generosity and strong-arm politics. After a single term in the Lok Sabha, however, Ahmed started losing elections: his Lok Sabha seat in 2009, then his old Assembly seat in 2012. Ahmad’s popular appeal declined when greed and selfishness became the defining markers of his reputation, not when his reputation as a criminal had faded. Faced with a loss of popular support and having been involved in one controversy too many, parties also jettisoned him, exposing him to legal pursuit.

The third part of the book seeks to address some of the consequences of the criminalization of politics for the rule of law, governance and democratic accountability. Vaishnav provides here a useful review of political events—notably the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party and the transformation of public discourse on corruption—and the recent state capacity literature, which points at the many structural weaknesses of the Indian state. He examines several possible remedies that could enable reformers to ‘weed out the rascals’ (p. 275) but cannot point to a method that would meet this objective without violating some basic democratic or legal principle, such as the equality of treatment for citizens or the presumed innocence for accused persons. Here, Vaishnav flirts with the risk of treating the presence of criminals in politics as a root cause of India’s political ills, rather than merely as a symptom of weak state capacity.

Nonetheless, Vaishnav’s book provides not only rich insights into a complex and important question but also very useful heuristics for the mixing of socio-demographic variables with other political variables. The quality of the prose also make it an excellent read for a wide audience.