The making of criminal politicians
EVERY evening, the road outside the office building where I used to work would turn into an impromptu hawker street. People would set up stalls and kiosks, selling samosas, momos, kathi rolls, bun omelette and masala chai. And every few weeks, almost like clockwork, we would espy from our office windows the hawkers hastily packing up their wares and making a dash down the road. A lookout had warned them of an impending municipal raid.
Within minutes, vans would arrive, accompanied by the local policemen, who on all other days gave their benevolent protection to the hawkers, in exchange for free snacks. A few stragglers — those who had hot oil to contend with — would get caught. The officials would confiscate the kiosks and pile them onto their vans, along with bags of vegetables, flour, spices and cooking vessels. The hawkers would stand meekly, nodding their heads in submission, as the babus wagged their fingers at them.
There were a few there who I had come to know — ‘Gupta ji’, who had lost money in a shop and was now selling bun omelette; Raju Pasi with a polio-struck leg and overdeveloped shoulders. He would push his cart down the road with one hand, and had a large multitasker stick in the other, his game leg wrapped around it. Raju got special treatment from everyone — the cops paid for some of what they took from him and the municipal authorities left him alone.
Like most of the other hawkers, Raju lived in a slum, about an hour’s walk from our office. A team of enterprising electricians sold him electricity, by stealing it from cables running past the unauthorised settlement. Water came in private tankers every morning and was sold by the bucket. Raju’s very life — indeed that of everyone like him — existed in that no-man’s-land between illegality and official apathy. If laws and rules were to be implemented in all their intensity, Raju would simply not survive.
In fact, a very large proportion of Indians live at the margins of the law. They slip through the cracks of property rights and civic rules — making a living on the roadside, where you are not even supposed to stop; building a hovel on common land; setting up an al-fresco home under a flyover; hovering between ticketless travel and paying huge premiums to get train tickets in black. They grow up in the shadow of the policeman’s danda, the government clerk’s insults. They use meekness and subservience as a tactic to survive within the interstices of civil society.
For the state, the Raju Pasis of India are invisible. But not so for the government, because the contract to govern has to be renewed every five years. The government must contend with this amorphous, fuzzy mass of people, who only get enumerated when they exercise their right to vote. So, the politics of governance requires contingent solutions to the illegalities of the dispossessed. They are contingent, because the Constitution cannot allow these solutions to be made universal — such as regularising an ‘unauthorised’ colony, legalising specific encroachments on government land, temporarily suspending fines on unlicensed small traders in a particular city, etc.
But each of these concessions has to be won through collective action by those living at the margins of civil society. It has to be a surreptitious collectivity, which must never attract the gaze of the state. Most often, it is organised under the aegis of a local strongman — a ‘bahubali’. They rise from within the ghetto, propelled by mythical stories of some originary act of spectacular violence — a ruthless beating or even a murder of an oppressor. The strongman represents the slum in negotiations with the authorities — allowing access to unlicensed water tankers or getting confiscated property back from the police without paying a fine or even making contractors pay wages for work done by labourers. They become the natural leaders of this ‘political society’.
At the same time, they also extract fees from the people they lead. The ‘bahubali’ controls electricity connections, water supply, runs the local kirana store, owns tenements which he gives out on rent to migrant workers. The strongman also provides employment — both civil and criminal. The marginalised are beholden to the ‘bahubali’ and, at the same time, are held by him. Very soon, the strongman enters politics, fights local elections and becomes a corporator.
The arms of the state now enter into a different relationship with him. His hold over local organised politics, his control of local crime and everyday violence make him a figure to contend with. Local policemen form an uneasy alliance with him, taking a share of the proceeds of his crime, offering him legal protection and turning a blind eye to his illegalities. The strongman can get things done, get a drunk husband in line, and even get errant boys out of the lock-up. It is an ever-widening spiral of crime, violence, patronage, politics, power and governmentality. And it sits upon the accidental, fragile relationship between the state and the marginalised.
It is this gap, between civil and political society, that produces the criminal politician, who operates simultaneously through benevolence and ruthlessness, populism and intimidation. He is in much demand, both from below and above. For the marginalised poor, the ‘non-citizen’, he is a ticket to governmental welfare. For those who rule from within civil society, the proper domain of the market and the nation state, the ‘bahubali’ is a ticket to a specific cache of votes, a source of an electoral alliance.
Yet, such strongmen have a limited life cycle. They survive by building ties with a specific government and the people who man the edifice of the state during a specific political regime. If these ties become too close, the strongmen too must fall when a particular government falls. But unlike the end of a political tenure, a strongman’s demise has to take place outside the formal system of governance, precisely because it resides outside that formal system. The belligerence of strongmen such as Atiq Ahmad and then their extermination are just so many symptoms of this underlying political process.
