Question

How do political parties make great use of criminals in the elections?
Civics - Political Parties
CBSE Class X

Answer 1

from which chapter is this question arise. Last week, five states in India began going to the polls. One of them, Uttar Pradesh, has a population of some 200 million people. The undertaking is so vast that polling will take place in seven phases, spread out over February and March.

India's national elections are an even more complex undertaking, often lasting up to two months from the start of voting till ballots are counted and the results announced.

This is done partly to provide adequate security at polling booths, to prevent vote rigging, a practice that was rampant in much of rural – and sometimes urban – India for decades.

Though it doesn't deal with the issue directly, Milan Vaishnav's new book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, helps explain why India takes such extraordinary steps to protect its voting processes.
The world's largest democracy, it turns out, has a government full of men – and occasionally women – who are steeped in and emerging from the world of crime. What's curious is that the crimes many Indian politicians are accused of are not white-collar crimes like corruption or bribery, but serious offenses like murder, kidnapping, arson, banditry, rapes and more.

Yet voters keep electing them and parties keep choosing them as their candidates. In 2014, some 34 percent of India's members of parliament faced criminal cases; 21 percent faced serious ones.

Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who specializes in India's political economy, spent years researching and conducting interviews on the ground. His book makes for sober reading. In an email exchange, he helped explain the "crime-politics nexus" in Indian politics and why India's case matters not just for other developing countries and nascent democracies, but also to established ones like the United States.

There's a certain element of corruption in politics everywhere. But what you highlight in your book is how, in India, politics is attractive to criminals. Why do criminals actually want to run for some of the highest offices in the land?

Criminals have been active in Indian politics for decades, dating back to the country's first elections following independence in 1947. Back then, the Congress Party [which led India's struggle for independence] was the center of political gravity and it contracted with criminals to mobilize or suppress turnout, hand out pre-election "goodies" or, in some extreme cases, capture polling booths

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