Crime, Politics, and the Future of India's Democracy

The review essays by Sunila S. Kale, Sandipto Dasgupta, and Michael J. Watts on my book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, and Steven Pierce's Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria raise a number of theoretically interesting questions about corruption, criminality, and their historical embeddedness. In particular, they force a rethinking of the commonly accepted notion that in many contexts the state, far from being seen as the remedy to citizens' core grievances, is the very source of the grievance to begin with. Paradoxically, elected representatives who helm the state apparatus are often the only actors with the authority and delegated powers to reform the state, something that they have few incentives to do.

My book When Crime Pays tries to provide a framework for understanding why one-third of elected parliamentarians in India are under criminal indictment at the time of their election. This nexus of crime and politics is present in both state and national politics; is geographically widespread; afflicts parties across the political spectrum; and appears to be growing, rather than shrinking, at a time when information about the private lives of India's political class is more widespread than ever before.

In her review, Kale makes an important intervention that requires discussion here. She argues that one potential explanation for crime in modern Indian politics can be found in the colonial period, when the law was a "weapon wielded to control populations, territory, and trade in the service of an inequitable colonial order." As such, it is perhaps no surprise that Indians do not seem bothered by political candidates who regularly run afoul of the law. Kale is most certainly right on this score: for many Indians, the state is an obstacle that needs to be circumvented or manipulated, as opposed to a popular enabler that can be harnessed with ease. Therefore, many voters perceive criminal politicians who are willing to throw their weight around to "get things done" as a potential lifeline. This argument is also in sync with Pierce's contention in his book on Nigeria that corruption in that African country has an expressly performative aspect to it; voters are rarely ignorant about their politicians' predilections, but they may find rational reasons to downplay or discount them.

There can be no more telling example of an historically distrusted state institution than the Indian police, whose operations are still guided by the Police Act of 1861, a colonial-era law enacted by a foreign imperial power more concerned with coercing subjects than providing community policing for citizens. As a result, many Indians continue to view the police as the criminal entity, not the lawbreaking politician who is willing to use his or her clout to get local police officials to register their complaints (which often fall on deaf ears, especially if you hail from the "wrong" caste or community). Although When Crime Pays does not dwell on the deep historical legacies that contribute to today's marriage between crime and politics, the concluding chapter does make reference to the enduring, path-dependent legacy of the zamindar (landlord). In many parts of India, the zamindar doubled as the local state—dispensing justice, collecting revenue, and providing local order. The widely accepted rule of the strongman in the contemporary period is likely, at least in part, an outgrowth of the pervasive reach of the zamindar of yesteryear.

The dilemma for democratic reformers is how to help India—and other countries like it—escape from the suboptimal equilibrium of criminal politics when it is the politicians themselves who make and enforce the rules. This is an issue that I take up in the penultimate chapter of the book and that Dasgupta astutely resurfaces in his review, when he asks, what are the "subject positions and sources of power of the agents who are to undertake these rather far-reaching changes?" There are no easy answers here, but let me offer up a few potential pathways. First, democratic reformers in India have had some success using the judiciary as a mechanism for compelling politicians...