Communal crimes pay poll dividends
DIVIDE AND CONQUER An HT analysis shows that politicians accused of communal crimes are four times likelier to win elections
More than fifty politicians who hold elected office in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies face charges in criminal cases related to inciting religious violence or stoking communal hatred, according to HT’s analysis of more than 50,000 candidates who contested elections in the past five years.
Though they comprise only a tiny fraction of all political nominees, candidates who have been accused or convicted of communal crimes win the elections they compete in far more often than those who have not been charged with any crimes, the analysis found, suggesting that voters see communalism as a reason to vote for a candidate rather than a political liability.
The list of politicians formally accused of communal crimes includes high-profile leaders such as union cabinet minister Uma Bharti; current Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath; his deputy chief minister, Keshav Prasad Maurya; and the Owaisi brothers of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.
Most of the cases remain pending in India’s clogged courts. HT’s analysis found only one political candidate had been convicted of a communal crime.
While courts tend not to penalize candidates for the criminal charges they face, voters positively reward them.
When the BJP’s T. Raja Singh last ran for office in 2014, for instance, he had been charged with eight communal crimes. That did not prevent him from winning the election by more than twice as many votes as the runner-up, Congress’s M. Mukesh Goud.
Interviews with voters indicated that Singh’s communal history enhanced his appeal. “Raja Singh stands for Hindutva, so we vote for him,” said Krishnamachari, 50,a government worker who supported Singh in 2014. “Someone’s criminal may be someone else’s saviour.”
Singh’s story fits a pattern of allegedly criminal communalism and electoral success. Candidates accused of communal crimes win their elections at a rate more than four times greater than those who have not been accused of any crimes.
Of the 41,488 candidates who had never faced criminal charges who ran in the 2014 Lok Sabha election and each state’s most recent assembly election, 2,550 of them (6%) won. But of the 187 candidates who had faced charges with at least one communal crime, 53 of them (28%) won.
The data for this analysis came from the self-reported affidavits that political hopefuls must file upon declaring their candidacies. The Association for Democratic Reforms, a government watchdog organisation, reads through the thousands of affidavits and posts the information online. HT wrote software to collect and analyse the data from ADR’s website, MyNeta.info.
Most of the country’s political candidates did not face any communal criminal charges at the time they entered the election fray. Of the 50,324 candidates analyzed by HT, 187 of them — less than one-half of one percent — stood accused of or had been convicted of com- munal crimes.
Of the 3,727 candidates the BJP nominated for state and national elections, 48 stood accused of at least one communal crime. That’s about 1.3%, the highest percentage of any party that nominated at least 500 candidates. Congress, by contrast, nominated 3,553 candidates, of whom 12 (0.3%) had been charged with a communal crime.
BJP spokesman GVL Narasimha Rao dismissed the findings. “Most of these charges have been leveled with a spurious understanding of what constitutes communalism,” he said.
Supporters of BJP candidates accused in communal cases also played down the significance of the charges. “Being accused of communal charges and actually inciting communal violence can be different,” said Kuldeep Maurya, 36, who voted for Adityanath in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
More accused communalists came from UP than any other state, but candidates with communal criminal records also ran relatively frequently in northern Telangana, coastal Karnataka, along the southern coast of Tamil Nadu, and in states such as Assam and West Bengal along Bangladesh’s northern border.
Each of these places has seen its share of religious strife in recent years, offering a clue as to how accused communalists appeal to voters.