What defines an election in Uttar Pradesh, India's biggest state, and, were it to be its own country, one of the world's largest democracies? Polls in UP are primarily about two things: crime and punishment. Most of the crimes are real, but the punishment is largely imaginary. To the extent that there is any accountability in UP, it is not exercised by voters, but by bandits, mafia dons and politicians themselves. And no- in case you were wondering-, there is no one guarding the guardians.
The Chief Minister of UP campaigns for reelection on few substantive slogans. One of the more memorable of these, however, is that if he is not reelected, he will almost certainly go to jail. Ergo, voters should vote to protect him. This slogan is curious in a hundred ways, but at a minimum, it demonstrates the perverse nature of politics in UP. Where else does a politician campaign by asking voters to help him with his problems, rather than promising voters help with their own?
Meanwhile, the CM's leading opponent, Mayawati, India's most powerful untouchable leader, has made putting the CM behind bars an important element of her own sloganeering. This is again rather bizarre. In transitional elections as Latin American countries democratized in the 1980s, prosecution of former dictators for human rights abuses was sometimes a campaign issue. But in what democracy does prosecution of democratically elected politicians who have no immunity in the first place constitute a serious campaign issue? Only one in which the criminal justice system is dysfunctional.
Mayawati has not promised to clean up politics, a claim she would at any rate have trouble pitching, given that she, like the CM, is under criminal investigation by the Indian equivalent of the FBI. (And given that her party, the BSP, like the CM's, has given a large number of tickets to known criminals in the current election cycle.) Instead, her appeal is intensely personal. She is going to arrest the CM, not all the criminals in UP, not even all the criminals in the ruling party. Just Mulayam Singh Yadav and his number two, Amar Singh.
This is not, after all, particularly surprising, because politics in UP is intensely personal. Political parties are not organizationally sophisticated institutions. Indeed, they have little structure to speak of; they are instead teeming, pyramid-like monsters, composed of blood relatives and sycophants, and a few Brutuses waiting for their moment to spring. UP politics is still, even after the decline of the Congress Party's hegemony, a family affair. In UP today, Rahul Gandhi, scion of India's first family, is leading the campaigning for the Congress. But the personalistic nature of UP politics is revealed not only by the cult of Gandhi; all of the major political parties are afflicted with a severe case of tribalism. Many of the ruling Samajwadi Party's top leaders are blood relatives of the CM.
If politics in UP is personal, it is also criminal. All three frontrunners for the post of CM are under criminal investigation, but a substantial number of ticket holders across all parties in this election also have criminal records. In fact, according to Election Commission records, between 15-30 percent of each major party's candidates in any given round of this election have criminal antecedents. Major mafiosi are also well represented across the parties. UP is the state that brought the world the Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi, who was an MP from Bundelkhand. Today, this part of the state is still represented by bandits.
Politicians sometimes deny that their respective parties are engaged in patronizing criminals. One campaigner from the BSP, Mayawati's party, told me that there were absolutely no criminals running under the party's name. The newspaper reports to the contrary, he claimed, were written by reporters stationed in Delhi who know nothing about UP. The overall claim is unsustainable; high-profile criminals whose names even a Delhiite would recognize are absolutely running on the party's tickets. Still, the campaigner had a point. In UP, anyone who wants to can charge anybody else with a crime. Because the system is dysfunctional, perfectly innocent people might be charge-sheeted for crimes by people with political vendettas against them. When corruption and crime is so rampant that a little bakshish will buy you a criminal charge against anyone, it becomes difficult to know who the real criminals are. Under these circumstances, having a criminal record is simply an indicator of having been in politics long enough to acquire enemies.
The crimes of political leaders do not dominate UP elections as much as the crimes of partisans, however. That is, elections are dominated by the crimes of those who want to stuff ballot boxes, engage in "booth-capturing," or otherwise intimidate voters into voting the way they want them to. How much security does it take to run a fair election in a state as lawless as UP? The Election Commission thinks it needs, in total, about a half million paramilitary troops. Because this many troops are not available to conduct polls in the state, the EC has divided the election into 7 phases, for which it is deploying around 70,000 troops during each phase. Even this number is considered to be too low by some.
More astonishing still is how much the EC thinks law and order have deteriorated since 2002 Assembly polls. Then, the EC used barely one sixth the number of troops to protect the vote. In some parts of the state, the EC is deploying around nine times as many troops this time. The EC's writ extends beyond the deployment of troops. Indeed, election time means that the EC assumes the mantel of an alternative government. No new programs may be started, or new phases of old programs rolled out, once the EC has called elections. The government may no longer transfer officials to new posts; instead, the EC itself has engaged in massive transfers. The ostensible purpose of these transfers is to remove partisan bureaucrats from sensitive positions and to replace them with officials that have reputations for greater integrity. Many top civil servants with control over the machinery of intimidation, such as the principle secretary in the Home Ministry, which controls the state police, have been moved.
The speed and power with which the EC rules almost makes you wish the body ran the state the rest of the time as well. Ultimately, though, the EC has arbitrary powers not befitting a legitimate institution in a democratic system. It is the dysfunctionality of that system which makes the EC a hero. The prevalence of crime, the impunity of the criminals, the corruption of the state bureaucracy, the partiality in delivery of basic government services-- these have all led to an increasingly muscular Election Commission exercising greater and greater authority through fiat.
This is not something to celebrate; it is something to fear. When the exercise of the franchise becomes largely an exercise in crime and punishment, democracy is failing.