CRIMINAL OUT OF THE POLITICS CAN IT BE DONE

journalists constantly wring their hands over the growing criminalisation of politics, and call on political parties to choose better candidates. such moral lecturing is vacuous. criminals are not entering politics because of some inexplicable moral lapse by candidate selection committees, but because they have huge incentives to get in. to get them out, we must change the incentive system. many laws need changing, but one single change can have a huge impact. let the law provide that criminal cases against legislators will be heard before all others on a day-by-day basis to ensure a quick verdict. in one stroke, that will create a huge disincentive for criminals to contest elections. many will resign from the legislatures to escape the consequences. today, criminals join politics to gain influence and ensure that cases against them are dropped or not proceeded with. the law disqualifies convicted criminals from fighting elections. but this does not keep criminals out of politics because legal delays, often abetted by political pressures, make convictions of resourceful crooks rather rare. criminals threaten witnesses with death, and the feeble state cannot protect them. so we need a radical change. i wonder why public pressure for such change is not greater. our standards have dropped so far that we no longer realise how outrageous our situation is by international standards. when i tell foreigners that our legislatures are full of bandits, they smile incredulously. surely you mean, they say, that bandits assist your legislators? no, i insist, the bandits are the legislators. at which point the foreigners look appalled and foxed: they cannot understand how this can be so in what claims to be the world’s biggest democracy. a casual look at last week’s events shows how commonplace is the mixing of crime and politics. exhibit 1: the gujarat police say the man behind the godhra massacre was a local muslim politician, a feared don. exhibit 2: mansoor ahmed, samajwadi party mla, was shot at a public meeting. his family says the killing was staged by a political rival, tanveer ahmed, who was denied the samajwadi ticket and so contested, unsuccessfully, on the bsp ticket. gang killings and political killings are becoming indistinguishable. exhibit 3: ram sewak gautam, a policeman who had the temerity to raid the premises of don-cum-politician dp yadav and track down his son vikas—who is accused of murder—was transferred in the middle of the murder case. most newspapers ignored this. it is no longer news that officials seeking to catch political criminals get sidelined. look further beyond last week to the up assembly elections. according to india today, 965 of the 5,539 candidates who contested the up elections had criminal records. that is a whopping 17 per cent of all candidates. why are political parties so happy to adopt criminals as candidates? to understand the answer, recall max weber’s definition of the state as the only entity that can use force with impunity. the rule of law is supposed to ensure that anybody else who uses force is jailed. but in india, a weak police and legal system ensures that mafia dons get away with murder. they can use force with impunity. so, a la weber, the mafia have as much legitimacy, in practice if not in theory, as the state. a criminal who can collect protection money is as powerful as an official tax-collector. a don who can use force to settle disputes is actually superior to the state, which is unable to settle disputes because of legal delays. a criminal candidate who can capture and stuff ballot boxes is, in our twisted democracy, on par with a popular politician who wins every vote. normally officials will report booth capturing, but not if the capturing don can credibly threaten them with death. besides, dons have lots of money, which is very useful for fighting expensive election campaigns. india has no system of public funding to enable honest people to meet election costs. black money is needed in hoards, and here criminals have a huge comparative advantage. in the up election, mayawati auctioned several candidatures to the highest bidder. so, according to reports, did the samajwadi party. obviously, criminals will get the better of honest folk in such auctions. why do dons invest large sums in getting tickets? because a ticket to the assembly is a ticket to kickbacks and extortion using political power. since the legal system no longer penalises theft, politicians who steal have a comparative advantage over others. returns on political investments are so high that criminals are disinclined to invest in tax-free rbi bonds. politics is so much more profitable, and just as tax-free. so, our system has unwittingly created huge incentives for criminals to enter politics. in the long run, we must clean up the legal and police system. meanwhile, we need quick steps to change the incentive structure. one is to provide public funding for elections. that will reduce the comparative advantage of criminals, and increase that of honest candidates. the second is to have a blanket ban on defections, a major source of political profit. any legislator who defects or disobeys the party whip in a vote of confidence should be forced to go back to voters for election on a new election symbol. those who split a party should go back to voters too. that will restore some meaning to representative government. but the most far-reaching measure, surely, will be to give automatic seniority to cases against legislators, which should be heard on a day-by-day basis. atal behari vajpayee, you need to find a new way of reviving the sagging fortunes of your party. why not try to seize the high moral ground by introducing a bill to prosecute criminal legislators quickly? your law minister, arun jaitley, will surely comply. true, such a law will be dismaying for mafia dons in your own party. but other parties have even more of them, and will suffer even more. what are you waiting for?

At last some leading public personalities are attempting to clean up India’s crime-ridden political system. For years people have metaphorically wrung their hands in horror and frustration as criminals have tightened their grip on politics, especially in the poorest and roughest states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

These criminals enter parliament and state assemblies and work closely with other corrupt politicians, the police, judiciary and bureaucracy who all help them run their gangs and fix government decisions and contracts.

This trend is now being attacked by a campaign called the Forum for Clean Politics, which is being run by the Public Interest Foundation, which in turn is headed by Bimal Jalan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and a top finance ministry bureaucrat, who is now a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament).

Bimal Jalan

Figures on the forum’s www.nocriminals.org website show that one in five Members of Parliament elected in India’s 2004 general election had pending criminal cases against them, either awaiting trial or on appeal after conviction. About half the cases are for murder, violent robbery or rape.

Those involved include 19 (40%) of 48 Maharashtra’s MPs, 13 (35%) of Bihar’s 37, and 23 of UP’s 80. Bihar’s list includes Lalu Prasad Yadav, the railways minister, who was the state’s chief minister till he had to resign over corruption charges.

Even more surprising and shocking is that five out of nine MPs (56%) in the Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which is headed by agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and aviation minister Praful Patel, have criminal cases.

Similarly, 42% - eight out of 19 – from the UP-based Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which is run by Mayawati, UP’s chief minister, are in the list.

Mayawati and Pawar are among the country’s most important politicians and they are both possible candidates to be prime minister, if neither the Congress Party nor the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win enough seats in the coming general election to lead a coalition.

I spoke to Jalan yesterday and he made the point that, bad though it was, a few criminals in politics did not matter so much when India’s parliament was dominated by the major parties. Now however, with the growth of coalition governments at both national and state level, small parties and their MPs exercise considerable influence.

“Governments have a lot of power over things that criminals want such as land rights and allocation of land, property rights, mining rights and environmental decision,” he says.

The figures show that MPs and candidates with criminal records are more common in regional parties like the NCP and BSP than in Congress and the BJP, where the percentages drop to around 20%. Analysts say that this is because regional party leaders and criminals are mutually useful to each other – criminals provide party finance and muscle power, and receive favourable decisions in return.

The statistics are based on returns that election candidates have to file with information of cases pending for more than two years. They are allowed to stand and be elected when they have either not been convicted, or are on appeal, because they can claim that they are innocent – though in many of the cases their guilt is beyond question. In India’s often corrupt judicial system, it is easy to delay and even fix cases so as to avoid a final decision.

Jalan is not sure how much impact the campaign will have, but he is sure that “parties will be much more reluctant to nominate people with criminal records”. Other foundation members include Naresh Chandra, former cabinet secretary and ambassador to the US, Tarun Das of the Confederation of Indian Industry, and Suresh Neotia, chairman of Ambuja Cement whose Neotia Foundation has provided the finance.

The campaign is being supported by some newspaper groups, including the Times of India, and other organisations. It is using mobile phone text messages to encourage voters to ask questions about candidates’ past histories, plus You Tube (two films click here and here), and has gathered 4,000 members on its Facebook entry for No Criminals in Politics. There is also an advertisement campaigns on tv and in newspapers encouraging people to vote with slogans like “keep religion out of politics and politics out of religion”.

Other public figures including Ratan Tata, head of the Tata group, and E, Sreedharan, who runs the highly successful Delhi Metro, last year launched the Foundation for Restoration of National Values. This is reported to be taking legal action over the vast numbers of government advertisements that appeared two weeks ago just before the general election was announced.

All this may not have much effect on the coming election, but it is a beginning. India’s greatest strength is its democracy and it is time it was wrenched free of criminals and their political friends.