CRIMINALISATION OF POLITICS, DOMINANT CASTE AND REPRESENTATION OF PEOPLE’S ACT 1951

WP-07

Democracy means popular government and the Parliamentary form of democratic system was adopted in India by the nationalist leaders of Indian freedom struggle. The parliamentary or representative form of democracy is best defined by John Stuart Mill in his classic, Consideration on Representative Government. It is a government wherein

“the whole people or some numerous portion of them exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves the ultimate controlling power which in every constitution must reside somewhere… this ultimate power they must possess in all its completeness” ¹

Parliamentary democracy allows a form of government in which the people of the nation-state rule through elected representatives in the parliament, chosen by free and fair elections and adult suffrage. There should be existence of two or more political part is necessary, fundamental rights are guaranteed and there must be coordination between the legislature and the executive. The Indian constitution stipulates different articles for these provisions like Article 79 to 123 deals with provision relating to parliament.

Although the parliament today comprises a fair mix of people from different backgrounds like professionals politicians, retired civil servants, business and former princes and other professionals but there has been steady decline in the quality of the members of parliament in terms of “integrity, knowledge and experience.” ² This decline can be visualised in the regular functioning of the parliament in comparison to the behaviour of the early politicians of independent India. Having different causes for the pathological behaviour of parliamentarians, criminalisation of politics and politicisation of criminals is one among them.

The political nature of crime has different connotation in the social setting. However at the level of phenomenon itself ‘politicization’ means “a historically change from normatively deviant to self-consciously political narratives while the opposite” and criminalisation means “the use of traditional criminal tactics and styles in various forms of political marginality”(Cohen 1996).  The main problem of this trend has effect on the system of free and fair elections. The criminal candidates of any constituency can use illegal means to stop other candidates from contesting elections, use the weapon of intimidation to stop supporter of other candidate to cast vote and use of money power to get vote in his favour.

Indian elections have been in the centre stage of media production houses and academic works. The change in the political environments after change in the party in power has various socio-political effects. But, increasing politicians- criminal nexus in India has assumed alarming situations in contemporary time. One fourth of the members of Lok Sabha face criminal charges roughly and the situations of state assemblies is even worse. These charges are from political offences to serious crimes (Dutta and Gupta 2009). However, the situation of criminalisation of politics can be seen in the different developing nations of the world but in India, it has transformed from politicisation of criminals to criminalisation of politics. The problems of governance, accountability, clean political environment, fair competition and other things are cited as the result of increasing criminalisation of politics. This phenomenon is persistent with all “ideological” circles of Indian democracy like “left”, “Right”, and ‘Centrist’ parties.

The Representation of People’s Act 1951 is the only mechanism through which the influx of criminals in the polity of country can be stopped. The law says that one cannot contest election after conviction in any crime and this moratorium is for 6 years from the date of conviction or after the release from the prison depending on the severity of crime. Earlier section 8(4) used to give 45 days for appeal in the higher courts but after the recent decision of Supreme Court no candidate can contest the election or ceased to be the member of legislature after conviction from any court of law. However in 2004, Election Commission of India proposed an amendment to debar any candidate from contesting election if the charges are framed by court against the candidate in any case having punishment of 5 years or more.

Bhaskar Dutta and Poonam Gupta looked at various hypotheses which suggested explaining about advantage-disadvantage curve of criminal candidates. They attached stigma to criminal candidates and assumed negative effects on voting process of people towards criminal candidates. They also said that “vote-share” of the criminal candidates decreases if other candidates are of clean background. So, candidates with criminal background uses “money power” to increase their vote share by winning over ‘marginal’ voters. Also, they can use campaign process to show their innocence in the cases filed against them which will help in reducing negative effects of ‘stigma’. For this, he looked through Nash Equilibrium of ‘game’ in which only strategic variable is the amount of the expenditure in campaigning process and they find out that Voters do penalise candidates with criminal charges. However Aidt. et al assumes that criminal candidates have some electoral advantages, although parties have to incur some reputational cost in the social world generally and in the media especially. They further find that voting turnout is inversely proportional to number of criminal candidates in the constituencies. In this research, also, they refuted the earlier research that criminalisation of politics is the attribute of constituency having large number of voters (Banarjee and Pandey 2004). So, rise in low caste and ethnic voting has given rise in criminalisation of politics.

The views of Aidt. et al (2011) has been refuted by Dutta and Gupta(2012), who say that voter turnout has no such effect of nominations of criminal politicians and the ‘negative correlation’ between voter turnout and criminal politicians was not found in 2004 and 2009 elections. But, Aidt. et al views on incumbency factor after the decline of Indian national Congress in assembly and parliamentary elections found empirical effectiveness in all the research done after it. Also, the money factor postulated by this research found proof in the subsequent researches of Vaishnav (2010), who found it one of the main factors for choosing criminal candidates by the political parties. Vaishnav (2010) also attaches concept of “dominant caste” (Srinivas 1962) with chances of winning of criminal candidates.  So, self-financing and dominant caste are two main reasons for increasing criminalisation of politics in India (Vaishnav 2010, Aidt. et al 2011).

Sometimes, Parties face “trade-off” between reputational costs and electoral advantages and when part fills that competition is very severe in some constituency then party generally files criminal candidates to have electoral advantage in the form of money and the candidate’s ability to resort to pre-poll violence (Vaishnav 2010).Also, criminality can serve as a signal of their credibility to protect the interest of the “in-groups” and their allies (Harriot 2003; Witsoe 2005; Smith 2008). A candidate’s credibility is evaluated according to how he protects the status or honour of his group using all the means available at his disposal in the social cleavage of his society. The people of caste groups vote those candidates who can serve the interest of their groups and the allies. That is the reason why several kinds of caste alliances are seen in the elections. As in the 2008 assembly election of Uttar Pradesh the slogan of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was Pandit sankh bajayeja; Hathi aage aage jayega meaning Brahmins of Uttar Pradesh will support in the victory of BSP.

Political parties also give tickets to those criminal candidates those who are associated with the caste politics in the state and can fetch the caste vote in the state or can be the caste face of the party in the state (Vaishnav 2012). As Babu Singh kushwaha was embraced in Bhartiya Janta Party even after having tainted background of corrupt practices so that BJP can show him as the “backward” face of the party in state assembly election. His criminal background can strenghthen party’s vote bank rather hurting it. Some regional parties are accepted in the regions based on their loyalty to some caste (Witsoe 2009). Rashtriya Janta Dal is seen as the main factor in the politics of Bihar which did not allow having communal riots in the state in 1990s. So, Muslims forms a crucial part of RJD vote bank and this logic of credibility founds support in the nomination of criminal candidate in the election (Witsoe 2009).

However, after transformation in the existence and ideology (Desai and Dubey 2012) of “caste in 21^st Century”, new groups are formed on the basis of identity and this identity plays a very big role in the ongoing criminalisation of politics. Now there is a competition between parties to file criminal candidates in some constituencies to get electoral advantage (Vaishnav 2012; Witsoe 2009; Dutta and Gupta 2012).however, this competition is not providing any incentives for the governance of that area (Glasso and Nannicini 2011). All citizens prefer suitable candidates but differ in their choices due to difference in group identity (Banerjee and Pandey 2009).

The recent success of criminal candidates in the election also provided impetus in choosing candidates of criminal background in the election. Recent survey by Association for Democratic Reforms shows that while only 12% of candidates with a clean background win on average, 23 % of candidates with some kind criminal records win, and more importantly, 23% of all those with serious criminal charges win (Shastry 2012). So, parties see a positive correlation between ‘winnability’ and serious crime. All parties give tickets to candidates having criminal background or record. In the areas reserved for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes, criminalisation in politics is very less as the chances of lower caste being also the dominant caste is very low (Vaishnav 2012) and the wealth power of SC/ST is also seen low at most of the places (Chin and Prakash 2010).

In most of the cited researches, the unit of analysis is constituency and the datas are taken from myneta.info which collects the affidavits of all the candidates contesting in election. The variables are education standard, relative wealth, and dominant caste of that area, percent of vote obtained, incumbent members, status of party, and seriousness of crime, incumbent party, age, gender and caste. Generally twenty states are chosen and North-Eastern states are excluded (Gupta and Panagriya 2012). Categories of education are chosen as education up to High School, up to undergraduate, up to postgraduate degree or technical degrees and also different dummies for all of them. Relative wealth is calculated as the ratio of wealth of the candidate divided by the average wealth of the rest of the candidates of those constituencies excluding independent candidates. Exclusion of independent candidates might have effect on the result because at some places dummy candidates are given ticket from some of the parties in support of independent candidate of criminal background. Criminal charges are defined as charges for serious offences and charges for non-serious offences. The offence is defined as per Code of Criminal Procedure. The dependent variable I is vote share which is defined as Y_i=log (Vote share_i /1-vote share_i).