In India, Criminals Take to the Campaign Trail

[user-Narotham Reddy]

From: Joydeep Mitra <joy...@bcmp.med.harvard.edu>
In India, Criminals Take to the Campaign Trail

By JOHN F. BURNS: February 26, 1998: New York Times: <let...@nytimes.com>

SAMBHAL, India -- Here in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh State, India's
Wild West, Dharam Pal Yadav is regarded as one of the baddest of the bad:
a 45-year-old gangster with at least 25 outstanding criminal charges,
including at least 6 for murder.

Yadav is campaigning for re-election to Parliament and has become something
of a totem in the Indian general election that ends next week. In the land of
Mohandas K. Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence, the election issue that has
attracted more attention than almost any other is not poverty,
illiteracy or even endemic disease.

The dominant issue is the criminalization of politics, symbolized by Yadav.

Although no reliable figures exist for this campaign, the extent of the
problem emerged in the election of 1996, when one study counted more than
1,500 of the 13,886 candidates with criminal records, including murder,
kidnapping, rape and extortion.

So common have criminals become on the campaign trail that men like Yadav,
and his aides, hardly bother to deny their past. Instead they try to justify
their misdeeds by portraying themselves as Indian Robin Hoods who broke
the law in the name of "social justice," or helping the poor.

Or they say their crimes were committed to settle political scores -- a
current issue for Yadav, who has accused his main rival, Defense Minister
Mulayam Singh Yadav, of having ordered the killing of Dharam Pal Yadav's
brother, who was gunned down last month. The candidates are not related,
although both belong to the same lower-caste clan.

"It all depends on what you call crime," said Divesh Srivastava, 30, an aide
to Dharam Pal Yadav. Srivastava stood at the edge of a dusty field as Yadav,
closely guarded by bodyguards with Kalashnikov rifles, waited for Uttar
Pradesh's chief minister, Kalyan Singh, to arrive by helicopter for a
rally in support of Yadav's campaign.

"If it's a political crime, it's not really a crime," Srivastava said.
"It's why you do it that matters."

In the current election, the number of candidates has dropped sharply,
to 4,693 for 543 seats in Parliament, partly because the Election Commission
increased the security deposit for candidates from 500 rupees, about $14
in 1996, to 10,000 rupees, about $255 at the current exchange rate.

The commission also decided to keep people from running for office if they
had been convicted of serious crimes like murder, rape or the promotion
or racial or religious hatred.

Before, because criminals were defined as those who had exhausted their
appeals -- a process that usually takes 20 years or more. This time the
commission said anybody convicted of a crime could not run for office
unless a higher court had issued a stay pending appeal.

Here in Sambhal the contest for the parliamentary seat has attracted
attention because both major candidates, Dharam Pal Yadav and Mulayam
Singh Yadav, are "history sheeters," people who have made regular
appearances on the charge sheets that police draw up against suspects.

Awaiting the helicopter, Dharam Pal Yadav, a slim, mustachioed figure
expensively dressed in white linens, a hallmark of Indian wealth, made a
point of his rival's record, as if to say it was worse than his own.

"Mulayam Singh Yadav has 35 cases registered against him," he said.

In this election more than 7,500 paramilitary troops and police officers
have invaded the area to try to stop warfare between the candidates'
private armies.

Since the election was called in December, the police say they have
seized thousands of rifles, pistols and homemade bombs and have closed
down several private gun factories.

But with almost daily shootings and political murders, villagers say
the police efforts have been mostly for show.

"Tell me, where is Gandhi today?" said a world-weary young villager,
Rajvir Singh, sitting with his cousin on a tractor at the edge of the
campaign rally. "Personally, I don't see any Gandhis anywhere," Singh,
22, added. "So people like us have to live with what we have."

Voters looking for political parties untainted by criminal links will
have a hard time. Almost all of India's 600 parties, certainly all of
the major ones, have fielded candidates with criminal pasts.

After running as an ally of Mulayam Singh Yadav in the last election,
Dharam Pal Yadav switched parties three times in the last six weeks
before becoming a candidate for a splinter party allied with the leading
Hindu nationalist group, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In the years when it was a marginal party, the BJP presented itself as
a "clean" organization. But as it gained power it followed the Congress
Party in nominating candidates with criminal pasts, especially in Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh, the two huge northern states that are the main
bastions for criminals in politics.

Between them, the two states have a population of 230 million, almost
as much as the United States. The states are among India's poorest, a
factor that political analysts say boosted power of goondas, or
hooligans in the Urdu language.

Studies have shown that more than 150, or a third, of the lawmakers in
the Uttar Pradesh state legislature have criminal records. In Bihar the
man who ruled the state as a personal fief for much of the 1990s is a
candidate in the current election. He resigned last year as the state's
chief minister after allegations that he and his associates stole nearly
$300 million from the state's treasury.

Criminals began to exercise political influence in the late 1970s, when
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, shocked by her landslide defeat in 1977,
turned increasingly to her son Sanjay.

Sanjay Gandhi, these Indians say, symbolized the shift in political culture
from the idealism of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first
prime minister, to a more opportunistic kind of politics that centered
on winning power for its own sake. Sanjay Gandhi was killed in a
stunt-flying accident in 1980.

Recent elections have brought some lurid individuals into Parliament. One,
running for re-election to Parliament again from Bihar, is Anand Mohan
Singh, 42, a former criminal who spent much of the 1980s as a fugitive.

In October 1994, prosecutors say, Singh, already a member of Parliament,
was leading the funeral procession of a leading gangster in a remote area
when the procession came across a young civil servant recently posted to
the area as its top official.

Angered by the young man's public crackdowns on criminal gangs, Singh,
the prosecutors charge, had his followers drag the official from his car
and stone him to death. Barely 18 months later, Singh declared his candidacy
for Parliament from the Bihar jail where he was awaiting trial.

He won release on bail and took his seat in New Delhi, where he promptly
drew attention with his menacing manner. In one debate he responded to a
rival politician's gibes by shouting, "Say that again and I'll come and
break your teeth."

While many Indians find the situation depressing, others take heart from
growing public indignation. President K.R. Narayanan has made the
criminalization of politics a major issue. Indians should realize that the
entire system is threatened by criminalization, Narayanan said, and
recall what Gandhi said on the subject.

Gandhi, Narayanan recalled, said it was every citizen's responsibility to
stand up against goondas. "It is we who make the goondas," Gandhi said.
"Without our sympathy and passive support, goondas will have no leg to
stand on."