 Good evening everybody. Good evening everybody. This is an unruly crowd, especially for Carnegie. It's really nice to see all of you and to welcome all of you to Carnegie. My name is Bill Burns and I'm the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I often get to stand here at this podium and introduce distinguished leaders, politicians, senior government officials and experts around the world. But to be honest, what I enjoy doing most and what I'm most proud to do is to introduce extraordinary Carnegie colleagues and their extraordinary work. And Millen Vashnev is certainly one of those extraordinary colleagues and his new book, When Crime Pays, is truly extraordinary. On its surface, the book might seem like an academic treatise on electoral politics in India, but as you'll learn tonight, it really is a profound piece of scholarship. Millen's research shatters a number of myths and assumptions about why candidates choose to run for office, why citizens vote the way that they do, and why democracies deliver or fail. His findings are informed by rigorous analytics and extensive field work, and they hold important implications not only for the future of India, but for the future of global democracy at a time when it is under siege here at home and around the world. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that more democracy means more problems, more dysfunction, and more discontent, Millen makes a powerful case that democracy itself is not the issue. It's the failure to invest in the institutions which give it meaning. I can't think of a more timely and important contribution. I can't think of a better example of Carnegie's policy-relevant research, and I can't think of a time when I was prouder to stand at this podium. We're also very grateful that Ishan Tharoor of the Washington Post and a terrific journalist has agreed to moderate a conversation with Millen after his opening remarks. So despite my strong inclination to linger up here, to savor this moment and further embarrass Millen, I know Millen's fan club is out in full force this evening to hear from him, not from me. So please join me in congratulating Millen Vashnev and welcoming him to the stage. Thank you all. It's great to see all of you here. I have many people to thank, so I hope you'll indulge me for a minute or two. I want to start by thanking Bill Burns for those very kind remarks and for his leadership and for his support of all the work we do here at the South Asia program. I want to thank my South Asia colleagues, many of whom are here today, our communications team for helping me get the word out. I want to thank Ishan from the Washington Post, who after I'm done up here is going to join me and we'll chat a little bit and hopefully chat with you all as well. Of course, I want to thank all of you for coming. Last but not least, I have to thank my parents for being here, who are sitting right up here. They have never, as far as I know, I think been to a Carnegie event, which is a think tank event, and I think they have this romanticized notion about what actually goes on here and they're about to find out how boring think tank events actually can be. I'm going to start out telling a story about this gentleman here, a guy by the name of Papu Yadav. Papu Yadav is a prominent politician in the North Indian state of Bihar. He started out his career as a small-time gangster, extorting local businesses, engaging in dodgy black market deals, working as a hired gun for local gangs. He blossomed into a full-time, self-styled mafia don, what they call in Hindi a Bahubali, so literally a strong arm, a strong man. He was once described by a journalist as having the physique of a baby elephant and the reputation of a raving, stampeding one. He, at the ripe old age of 23, had accumulated so much political clout that he decided to run for office and he won handily his first election. A year later, in 1991, he secured a seat in the National Parliament. Now, Papu Yadav's luck ran out in 2008. He was convicted and given a life sentence for murdering in cold blood a political rival. His political career did not end. He did the natural thing, which is he fielded his wife. His wife stood in his stead and won his seat to parliament. In 2013, due to some mysterious improprieties with the prosecution's case, he was let go and he was greeted in this picture here by hundreds of well-wishers outside of his jail cell. Now, Papu is a pretty special guy. The first thing that he did after getting out of jail was to write a memoir, as one does, called A Solo Traveler During a Time of Rebellion. And far from running away from him, political parties actually rushed to embrace him. So, invitations to his glitzy New Delhi book launch for his memoir were secured by leaders from about half a dozen political parties. Within a year, he stood for national office and won again, as did his wife. Today, the only husband and wife couple in parliament. It was his fifth time as a member of parliament representing his constituency. Now, Papu Yalda's a special guy. He's clearly a man of special talents. If you were to enter in criminal gangster India, you'd probably get somebody who looked like him. But there's something deeper going on. This is a map of India broken into its 543 electoral districts, congressional districts. Every constituency you see in orange is represented by a member of parliament who's under criminal indictment. Now, I should be clear what that means. These are people who have criminal cases against them. It doesn't mean they've been convicted yet, but it also doesn't mean a mere charge. These are ongoing judicial proceedings against these members of parliament. As you can see, it literally touches sort of all four corners of the country, north, south, east, west. Another way of looking at this data is as follows. This is from members of parliament from the last three general election cycles, 2004, 2009, 2014, and the share that have criminal cases. Now, there are two bars here. The black or grayish bar are those who have cases, and the orange are those who have serious cases. Now, what's a serious case? Take out anything that could be plausibly related to politicking, libel, slander, electioneering. Even give, you know, take away unlawful assembly rioting. And what you're left with is murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, extortion, causing grievous harm. That's what that orange number is. So there are three things to note about this chart. Number one is, as of today, members of parliament about a third have cases against them. One in five have serious cases, which means these are cases that if a conviction were obtained would mean serious jail time. The third thing to note is that these numbers are actually increasing rather than decreasing over time. All right, so what is a book about? So the book is really about the central puzzle, which is how can criminality of such an extent in democracy coexist? How can you have on the one hand free and fair elections with robust, competitive, multi-party elections, and such a large number of criminal or corrupt legislators? I mean, democratic theory has taught us that the great thing about democracy is that if there are elected representatives who betray the public trust, you can boot them out at the next election. You can kick the bums out and throw the rascals out. What does it mean for how we think about democratic accountability if the rascals far from getting kicked out are actually getting kept in? They're elected and often re-elected. Now, many of you probably want to go down to the bar downstairs to start drinking, so I'm going to give you the answer. So if you want to go downstairs, you can. This is the punchline. The argument I make in the book is that politics sort of function like a marketplace. Everybody has to survive this kind of market test, and the market has two underlying drivers, supply and demand. So there are two questions that sort of motivate the book. On the supply side, why is it that parties inject supply of criminals into the marketplace? Why do they embrace them? And then on the demand side, why do voters vote for them? And again, what are widely believed to be free and fair elections? The answer on the supply side comes down to money in a context when elections have become increasingly costly, parties have not been able to keep up. And so they are looking for individuals who have deep pockets and can pay their own way. And people with serious criminal records represent one important demographic of people who have money to spare. Now, on the demand side, why do voters vote for them? Because in certain contexts, criminality actually signals the credibility to get stuff done, to actually fill a vacuum of representation. All right, so I'm going to talk a little bit more about this, but before I do, as a political scientist, I have to bore you with a little bit of methodology, but I promise it will be painless. The foundation of this book really comes from these documents you see here. In 2003, the Supreme Court of India mandated that anybody who stands for office, anywhere in India, at the time of their election, at the time of their nomination, they have to submit a judicial affidavit in which they detail their financial assets, liabilities, and their criminal records. So what we did, a team of us, was over several years compile these records on about 70,000 political candidates running at the state and national level, beginning in 2003 up until 2014. And that gave us a bunch of interesting patterns to sort of examine. Taking those numbers, we went into the field and spent time on political campaigns to try to figure out parties, voters, politicians, how do they interact, right? What is it that's actually making this marketplace tick? This is a picture of me with a well-known Mafia Don politician named Anand Singh. I'm going to come back to Anand Singh. He's also kind of a colorful guy. Then, having lived at this micro level, we kind of zoomed back out and did a bunch of voter surveys to try to see if we could kind of make more systematic generalizations about the stuff we were seeing in the field. And so we asked people about their views on political life, on criminality, and so on and so forth. Okay, so that was painless, right? That was the methodology. Now, getting to the substance, question number one is why do parties give these folks, you know, tickets? Why do they embrace them? Now, the shortest answer to this question is because they win. So this is everybody who stood for national office from 2004 to 2014. It's about 21,000 people. This is their chance of winning the election. If they have no case, 6%. And if they have at least one case, 18%. Okay? So candidates who have criminal cases are three times as likely to win election to parliament in New Delhi. Now, that's really not that satisfying because we want to know sort of what makes them winnable, right? It comes down to money, as I alluded to before. As elections have gotten increasingly costly, parties have limited capacity to mobilize money, they haven't invested in their kind of organizational rejuvenation, and they've got to find a way to plug this sort of fiscal hole. And so they are searching for candidates who can self-finance. Now, what it means to self-finance is not only pay for the cost of running your election, it also means paying parties for the privilege of running under their symbol. It means subsidizing, say, lesser-endowed, poorer candidates who can't go to run, and maybe occasionally looking the other way if there's some shadiness or some rent seeking going on. So again, this is that same pool of people who've run for national office the last few election cycles, sorted by how wealthy they are. So the far left are the poorest 20% of candidates, the bottom quintile, and the far right is the top quintile, the richest 20%, and this is how likely they are to win the election. 20 times more likely if you're in the richest 20% compared to the poorest 20%, okay? So money really matters. Now, who has money? As I said before, people who are tied to criminal activity. They have the resources and the incentives to deploy that money back into politics, not necessarily because they have formal immunity in India which they don't, but obviously you have a lot of perks when you're in power to sort of derail or delay justice. So here's a statistic that kind of illustrates that. The median clean candidate. So a clean candidate here, someone who doesn't have any serious cases against them, is worth about 900,000 rupees. The median criminal candidate is worth 4.1 million. So you have a four times as large as financial advantage if you have a serious criminal case against you. Okay, so that's the supply side, right? That's how politicians come into the marketplace via political parties. Now why do voters vote for them? Which I think is sort of the more interesting part of this question. The argument I make is that criminality has become a badge of honor. That in areas where the rule of law is very weak and government doesn't work very well, politicians use their criminality to signal their credibility to represent their constituents' interests, right? They're protecting those interests. How do they do that? Through four distinct sort of pathways. The first is to intervene in the process of redistribution to make sure that they can direct benefits to their followers, to their constituents. The second is coercion, right? To act as a kind of physical presence to deter threats from rival communities. To act as a sort of giver or provider of last resort, right? Life is uncertain. I might have a death in the family. I've got to pay for a funeral. I have a wife or a daughter who's dowry I have to cover. I need someone who can go to help me out because I don't have those resources on hand. And somebody who can resolve disputes. Everybody knows India knows that the judicial system isn't exactly the most efficient. And so if you have, say, a property dispute with your neighbor, you just want a judgment so you can go on with your life. And these people are able to provide that judgment. Now, there's a second ingredient. It's not only about government not working. It's also about social divisions. That voters are much more likely to support these characters where social divisions are highly salient. They are not interested in improving life for the community at large, for the constituency at large. They're interested in delivering benefits to their narrow segment of society. Segmented by caste, by religion, by ethnicity. And in a place like India, which has first passed the post electoral system just like the United States, but you have more than two parties, you have in many constituencies four or five parties, you can win an election with 25 or 30% of the vote. Which means if you can carry your group, you don't have to worry about anybody else. You don't have to cater to the median voter. So what does this mean? So this is Anand Singh, the guy I showed you before. This is, believe it or not, his reelection poster from 2010. And I saw this and thought, you know, that's an awfully odd poster. You know, you're used to seeing sort of the candidate and the spouse and the family dog and all that. Then I remembered that this was the big Bollywood blockbuster of 2010, The Bung. Some of you have probably seen this movie. The Bung is an interesting movie, actually. A lot of political salience. The main character is played by Saman Khan. He's a police inspector named Inspector Pandey, who goes by Robin Hood Pandey, who is a crooked cop with the sympathetic streak. He does bad, but he does bad in order to do good. And when I saw these two things, I realized that this is not coincidental, right? This is very much on purpose. That voters are voting for Anand Singh, not in spite of his criminality, but because of his criminality. And when I went and asked one of Anand Singh's voters, you know, this guy has a pretty lengthy rap sheet. He has a murder charge. He has a rape charge. A lot of bad stuff. And he said, no, no, no, you don't understand. Anand Singh is not a murderer. He merely manages murder. It's like, okay, maybe a little bit better on the hierarchy. But what he was trying to say is that he is the CEO of a kind of local protection racket, right? I'm getting something out of this guy. He's not just someone who sort of rapes and pillages. Okay, so what can we do if we want to address this problem? So there's a short term and a long term. The short term is obvious. You could help to clean up the supply, which means cleaning up political funding. Right now there's no transparency around political contributions. Political parties aren't subject to kind of any kind of independent audit. They're very weak enforcement powers for election agents to try to take action against people who flout these rules. That would certainly help. But it's not going to do anything to get at the underlying demand for this issue. And in the long run, right, the only solution is to improve governance from the ground up. And you need to do two things simultaneously. I think a lot of people who have interacted with the Indian state, I'm guessing many people in this room would love to just sort of slash and burn and see it shrink considerably. But that's not the right answer. You need to shrink the red tape and cut back the procedures. All of this paperwork that's in this poor bureaucrats office, but you actually need to create more bureaucrats. You need to create more doctors and more judges and more police officers and people who can actually fulfill the sovereign responsibilities of the state. So somewhat paradoxically, it's over-bureaucratized in procedural terms, but under-manned in personnel terms. So what does this mean for other democracies? And then I'll stop and invite Yashan to come join me up here. The first is, and I think this should maybe resonate with some of us in this room, is don't underestimate the voters. They're not stupid. This isn't about voters being pawns in some game that's being rigged by people. They know what they're getting and they have a strategic calculation for voting the way that they do. The second is, think about the role that money is playing. We often say, there's all this money, it's affecting policy outcomes we might care about, and all of that is true. But it's also having a subtler but just as important effect, which is shaping who comes and joins politics in the first place. It's narrowing the talent pool of people who are willing to come forward. Lesson number three is that sunlight is not always the best disinfectant. Now, transparency is good for a lot of things. As I always tell people, I couldn't have done this study without transparency because no one would have ever had to sort of declare these affidavits. But that's not the binding constraint on voter behavior. Telling voters that so-and-so is a bad person who has lots of criminal cases is probably not telling them something they don't already know. Last but not least, in a very perverse kind of way, this is democracy in action. These politicians are running in some of the world's most competitive elections and winning. And we need to think about that and how criminality of this type can actually be compatible with democratic accountability. Maybe not in the ways we'd like to see, maybe with all kinds of unintended consequences, but they're actually existing within this kind of democratic marketplace. All right, thanks very much. I want to invite Yashan Thourour, and while he's getting settled up here, Yashan writes for The Washington Post. He is the author of a new daily column, which you all should subscribe to, called Today's World View. Prior to joining The Post, he was an editor and reporter at Time Magazine. And some of you may have seen that in the last 12 months or so The Washington Post has surpassed The New York Times in terms of page views. That's either a correlation or a causation, but it happened just around the time that Yashan joined. Well, thank you so much. It's great to be here for Milan's book launch. It's a wonderful turnout. This is my first time looking in this direction at a Carnegie event, and I'm really delighted to be here. Yashan Thourour, writer of The Washington Post, and as Milan said, I'm now just launched this project where I'm every day reckoning with Trump in the world. So it's really great to be here talking about a much more listening subject. So I think just to get us started then, I was wondering, you know, India's not the only country that has a politics where corruption and crime is endemic or entrenched in various ways. There are other countries in Asia, I'm thinking Pakistan, I'm thinking, say the Philippines, where on a certain level they're even more shameless. And so to what extent, I mean, is there a way in which the scale of crime and criminality in India and its nexus in India's political life is different than other places? I mean, what are the kind of global comparisons that you were thinking about when you approached this subject? Yeah, I mean, I think the first reaction that many people had when I started working on this was that, you know, it sounds to me like you're describing, you know, turn of 20th century American politics, right? I mean, this is sort of Tammany Hall and so on and so forth. I think there's certainly a lot of truth to that, right? I mean, this co-mingling of crime and corruption in politics is certainly not new and it's not unique to India. I think there are a couple of things, however, which make India unique. One is obviously the scale, right? The numbers are pretty stark. The second is the nature of the crime we're talking about, right? I mean, this is not sort of embezzlement or white-collar crime. I mean, for lack of a better word, this is sort of blue-collar crime. And in many countries, including in our own, you see criminals corrupt people operating at the periphery of politics and they're often king-makers, right? They're sort of making a bet and they're backing somebody who's the front man or the front woman. In India, what's so interesting is that the criminal and the politician are the same person and that wasn't always the case. So if you go back and you rewind the clock to the 1950s when you just had one major dominant party, which was the Congress Party, criminals were hired guns. They worked for political parties and they could rest easy at night knowing that the Congress is going to win the election the next day. Once that started to break down, it was always because if they backed the Congress and the Congress lost, then they were going to be in trouble. And so what you see over time is they had accumulated their own clout is a sort of vertical integration. Think about an automotive company that decides to manufacture tires, right? They sort of do everything in-house. That's what they decided to do. And I think in many countries, you still see some of the separation where you have godfathers who are sort of operating backing candidates, who are necessarily the same person who's on the ballot who people are voting for. I mean, just to take a small, I mean, actually a rather big step back. Why isn't there a larger sense of crisis in India about just the numbers that you're talking about a third of the parliamentarians having these kinds of cases? Why isn't there a kind of greater national sense of alarm? You know, it's sort of the same reason why there's not a national sense of alarm in India about malnutrition. Everyone should be shouting from the rooftops about how people are dying, you know. Why is that the case? Because it's blended into the mundane and the everyday. It sort of becomes something that's totally rootinized. And, you know, when I would talk to Indians when I started writing this book, they sort of said, well, why do you want to write this book? I mean, you're just describing everyday life. That's not very interesting. And I said, no, no, no, but it is interesting to some of us, you know, because it's sort of there and therefore accepted as a given. And so no one has ever sort of tried to understand, you know, what is it that makes this tick? And only when you understand that can you understand how do you unwind that system? And that's the case. And, you know, it's not restricted to any one state, any one political party, any one ideology. I mean, this is sort of a equal opportunity issue. So... You talked a little bit about your methodology in your presentation. For those who pick up the book, it's an incredible piece of research, reportage almost. I can say that as a journalist. And it's really remarkable the many layers of documentation, statistical analysis, and almost anthropological analysis that you put into it. Could you tell the audience a little bit about sort of the genesis of the book and the amount of time, I mean, the many years that it spans in terms of work that you put into it and the places that you went? So, it started when I was a, I mean, I was a PhD student who had no clue what I was doing and I decided to spend a summer in India and working on some really esoteric subject that I'd sort of half forgotten. And I remember sitting one day and watching the scene unfold on television where so many of you who work on US-India relations will remember in 2008 there was a crisis in India because the government faced a vote of no confidence over the US-India civil nuclear deal. This was the congress government at the time of Mon Mon Singh. And they were so worried that they were going to lose this vote of no confidence and there will be pressure elections and all the rest that they temporarily furloughed six MPs who had been convicted on murder charges to come to the floor of parliament to vote just to make sure that the government had enough votes. And so I remember watching the television and sort of seeing these six guys including Papua Yadav who we talked about at the beginning said, well, though they're criminals in Indian politics this is interesting and nobody sort of made much fuss. I mean there was sort of a little blurb and there was something in the paper the next day but no one really said much about it and I thought well, is this a thing? I mean is this sort of a widespread thing and sort of the more I dug in murkier it became and I figured out that you know there really was this strange market at work that needed to be unpacked. So it was completely unintentional and it was really that one moment that sort of set the light bulb off and then it sort of took off and I remember feeling at some point you know this started in 2008 that I got to finish this thing this thing has been going on for too long but the numbers kept going up so I thought well this book is going to have a long shelf life so I could take as long as I want because it's not going to go to it. So talk a bit about some of the places that you went and the politicians and politicians stroke criminals that you followed around? Yeah, I mean I obviously I started in Delhi and I talked to a lot of politicians and party workers and retired bureaucrats to sort of get a sense of what was happening and then the first campaign I kind of observed was in 2010 in Bihar which many of you know Bihar is sort of the hotbed of crime and corruption and it's also a very poor state and I spent some time on the campaign trail just following these people around trying to understand you know sort of what's going on and then I did that two other times which is in Jorat which is in the west which is the state and the movies from state that my family happens to be from and then in Andhra Pradesh which is in the south and in Andhra I didn't follow a criminal politician but I followed the first time candidate who was a very successful entrepreneur western educated came from means decided to run for office and I saw sort of firsthand how much he was spending and how you sort of get onto this hamster wheel you can't get off so this particular individual whose name I sort of obscure in the book I call him Sanjay spent about two million dollars of his own money which if you do the calculation that's a lot of money in rupees and he said this thing which I'll never forget which is before I left the constituency I said good luck hope you win and he said if I win you got to come back and I'll show you around the state legislature I said great and he said if I win I'll probably have to do some pretty bad stuff because I got to raise money to win five years from now so he was sort of wanted to give me the caveat up front that he was going to be a sort of different person when I came back the next time with any kind of dicey moments in terms of your interactions with these people you're asking them about particularly the various activities here and there yeah I mean it's a question I get a lot I mean the flip and answer is no because you know they're parading this around in front of everybody so it's hardly a secret to sort of share it with somebody like me but I think to be honest I benefited a little bit from a kind of outsider or outsider thing I'm going to happen to be of you know Indian extraction born and raised in the United States and so most of these guys thought it was pretty cute you know that oh this guy who doesn't know anything, who's doing a PhD has come down and you know come come sit let me explain to you how politics works in this area and so it was a sort of bizarre kind of a feeling but in a way it sort of worked it worked to my advantage and you know I think the thing that I realized is that you have to be careful about asking about the money people would be happy to talk about like I wanted for three murders in three districts that wasn't an issue but when you started talking about their pocket books it became a bit they got sort of you know they clammed up and then you had to do more triangulation of course you had these affidavits which you know aren't perfect they're self-reported there's definitely some measurement error but they give a kind of ballpark sense of kind of what's going on so about the money you know last year on the day of the election here India embarked on this incredibly radical scheme of demonetization I'll let Milan explain that when he answers this question and many people assumed that this scheme was related to elections and related to the prevalence of undisclosed black money in elections how has your thinking about the nexus of crime and politics evolved just in the space of the past few months ahead of these elections yeah so on November 8th while we were getting ready for a moment to stay over here Prime Minister Modi announced this radical demonetization plan in which he sort of overnight invalidated about 86% of India's currency so basically eliminated the 500,000 rupee notes which are sort of the upper denomination notes on the theory that if you're engaged in corrupt or illicit activities it's a lot easier to do that in bigger notes because frankly you don't have to worry about carrying briefcases that are quite as big and he announced this in the evening and four hours later at the stroke of midnight that money was useless I mean you could still deposit into your bank account within a certain time period of course that money became in banks and had to come above board now this was a hugely traumatic event in some ways and people like Sadhana and others have written about this more than I have but the end result of it was the hope was you're going to invalidate all this money and people would get screwed they would hold all this black currency but all the currency made it back into the system so somewhere or another people found a way maybe taking a haircut but laundering this money back into the system and so the big payoff never really materialized now the Modi government is feeling the heat because they made people go through massive inconvenience but they don't have any big fish they've really caught no politicians who have been sort of jailed because of this but because of that in the budget that was released yesterday they have introduced four measures to reform election funding so in a perverse kind of a way although the actual act didn't do very much it's forced them to try to do something so what are some of the practical medium term maybe long term political processes that could change the landscape in such a way that there isn't such a shadow of crime on Indian politics yeah I mean I think what they've tried to do is clean up the money but it's been they've I'll try to be as charitable as possible they've taken steps that are great in terms of claiming the moral high ground but they're not so great in terms of what kind of impact they're going to have on the ground I think that's the fairest way to put it now they get credit for raising the issue at all but but what would you do if you were really serious about this so the first thing you would do is you're basically telling all of India that you need to move to a 21st century cashless economy well the first people you should start with are political parties but political parties can still take donations in cash there's something called the right to information act which is like our FOIA our freedom of information act there was a ruling which said that political parties are subject to the right to information act political parties respond by saying we don't recognize your jurisdiction to tell us that and so we're just not going to comply so the information authority said we actually can't do anything about this sorry you know there is auditing of party books done by an in-house hand selected auditor so you can imagine that you know people come in they give them the paperwork they sign it and they're never going to be heard from again but again as I mentioned those are sort of things that will help get at this one element of the problem I think the bigger question is you know how do you deal with the infirmities of the state right I mean you look at the justice system you've got 31.5 million pending cases winding their way through the Indian court system you've got 25% of the police force the civil police force which doesn't exist the posts are sanctioned on paper they don't exist in practice you've got the fewest number of bureaucrats per capita of any G20 autonomy now obviously it's more complicated than having more people you have to have good people and qualified people and all the rest of it but that's a generational issue I mean that's not something that's going to change overnight because it requires resources it requires planning it requires human capital higher education all of these things where India has fallen on me that's kind of a very heavy note I'm going to get some audience questions in just raise your hand identify yourself and identify yourself as have any geographic I mean I think you know we certainly have this benchmark of states that are better government than states that are the worst government but states are these huge geographic entities the state like Uttar Pradesh which is about to go for election has 200 million people the fifth biggest country in the world sixth biggest country in the world there's a lot of heterogeneity of variations going on within states so even a place like Gujarat which is a well to do prosperous state it was the state that Modi ran for a dozen years you go out to western Gujarat to and you think you're in the wild west these are places where the local state is not a very present so that's part of the answer the second part of the answer is you know India is a very diverse country with a lot of social cleavages but they're not activated all in the same way and a lot of that has historical reasons for why divides between caste are are greater or smaller but in those places where there's a lot of churning over social dominance which community controls the levers of power is where you see these things it surprised me to see Kerala people find a lot of political violence if you go to a place like West Bengal where the conflict isn't so much necessarily on ethnic lines per se very clear partisan or ideological lines and almost mass ethnicity so I think ethnicity is happening you know probably everywhere or most places but then you also see these nuances in particular patterns in some corners of India there in the front and then we'll go get towards the back Howard Schaefer how strong is sentiment in India about this issue people really care they're just shrugging at all if that's the way things are going we did a survey where we asked voters around the country this is around the time of the 2014 election about 50,000 voters this is a big survey how do you feel about voting for a member of parliament who happens to have serious cases but gets stuff done and 26% of voters say they'd be fine with that and I suspect if you ask that question in a slightly more sophisticated way where people could really tell you what they believe the number would probably be even higher than 26% so I think people are aware of this it's not like it's anybody's first best option of vision of how politics should be it's sort of the one that they've got right and so you see things like what's happening right now to come back to it with their pradesh where you have a state which has a lot of criminals in politics you have a leading candidate to be chief minister of that state who has a pretty clean reputation of being a reformer of taking on so-called bad elements now people are voting for him but they're also voting for their local candidate for hedging their bets they would like Mr. Clean to come over and make everything work but that's probably not going to happen overnight and so in the short term in their proximity they're going to need someone who's going to have their back so hopefully over time Mr. Clean chief minister can spread his wings and deepen the reach of the state and I won't need my local insurance anymore but until those two things meet I think you're going to keep having this you know that first hand in the back you said the blue shirt is there an urban rural divide I mean typically I'm from Bombay and I hardly know if anyone goes out in boats honestly and I think and I think we do know statistically that the rural turnout in India is more than the urban turnout but I'm wondering whether there's a rural divide even in the sort of politicians who stand up yeah let's do that no more questions and then we'll put it all together ma'am in the pink jacket right there oh I'm making this very hard for you, sorry so try to identify yourself Parveen Huda at the end of your talk you mentioned that this kind of phenomenon could be compatible with accountability but I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the kinds of campaigns that these people under indictment would run so for example were there higher incidences of odor fraud intimidation how clean or dirty of a campaign do they run particularly as compared to the so-called clean ones who are not under indictment quick question does crime pay for women okay so you got that urban rural divide yeah crime paced women and then that no question sure about accountability so on the urban rural one it's happening in both places and I think this is partially a function of how urbanization has been managed or mismanaged in a lot of India where people came to the city expecting sort of a higher quality of public service delivery and what they're finding is that urban local governments aren't able to deliver that and so a party you said you're from Bombay like the Chief Sena is able to create a almost parallel administration of dispensing all of those things I mentioned security, justice, so on and so forth like in the the deepest parts of the inner city of Bombay so I think that's something when I think out into the horizon about what worries me the most one is clearly the demographic shift all of these young people are entering the labor force not finding jobs and the second is this rural to urban transformation because you know the numbers are pretty staggering the second on the accountability point I mean I'm pretty careful in the book I think to sort of point out that obviously this accountability is somewhat partial as I mentioned before if they create lasting sustainable solutions for everybody in their districts they're going to write themselves into irrelevance then no one needs them anymore because the state is working pretty well so they want things to work but they want to be seen as the person who mediates between the citizen and the state and again they want to do it for some segment of society where that allows them to kind of burnish their own a few days. I think that the kind of argument that I was sort of militating against is that I think there's an impression of these folks being kind of little subnational dictators and authoritarian figures and I think that it's more useful to think of these folks as a sort of product of democracy rather than its antithesis that makes any sense on the crime page and women there are very few women criminals in politics which is an argument for having more women run and win elected office there are a few and the way Indian politics is played out many of them who are criminals or associate with criminality often are the wives or family members or people who can't contest elections and so they need to field somebody in their family who can but yeah I mean there is a very bad gender imbalance that makes men look pretty bad let's do another round of questions I know there are drinks to be had and books to be signed so I'm going to keep here too long you man in the far back are there other mics there I just want to make sure that I'm not missing the point that you were actually saying is it the case that the crime page because the voters vote for the criminal not just because they have more money to win the election but they then mobilize a kind of criminal network to provide services that the state is not providing is that part of the argument we got that just that hand on the left right there just right next to you I'd like to bring it home is there any way you can reform the criminals is there any way I think we have some with mental health problems that might have some commitment mental health any thought of that and for our country really important we're stuck for four years you're going to get me in trouble and you man in the pink jacket that's my colleague Sarah you don't have to call on her Sarah Chase Carnegie Endowment also to bring it home your slide one of your final slides about campaign find those sort of proximate causes right campaign financing you mentioned that it offers opportunities for basically moving black money into dirty money into the system so making a comparison to the United States which I know is unfair but on proximate causes given what you know about how US political financing is structured are you able to make a comparison between features of the Indian system in this regard and features of the American system in order to instruct us as to whether not just money might be unaccountably put into American political campaigns but whether campaign financing might be a vehicle for getting dark money into the personal pockets of US political actor candidates does that make any sense do we have the sort of chicken and egg question of you know why are they voting to these criminals is it because they feel coerced or because the criminals create the infrastructure for better life question about whether these criminals can reform when they enter politics and then the one the comparative gesture is to do the second and third are oddly related let me start with the first I think the argument is that again where you have these two things coming together government isn't working as it should and people don't believe it to be an impartial provider of basic things the state should do and where you have the social cleavages made salient these folks come in and enter as Robin Hoods and they're seen as saviors and they're people who know how to get stuff done for their groups and so that's now the money certainly helps it helps them provide those things it helps them gain access to the political system in the first place but you know there are many cases of such figures getting thrown out for non-performance they've become two in it for themselves they no longer care about the people they become disconnected and they do get booted so there is a replenishment they tend to win they tend to reproduce but they're not untouchable from a electoral standpoint I think that's important to point out number two is can they reform themselves and Sarah's question I think in some ways this is a bit of a downer but the hope is that you sort of move into an American style equilibrium from where you are now which is to say these folks like Papua Yadav and Anansing and all what are they doing now they become legitimate business people so it's a transition from godfather one to godfather three you start as the sort of the mafia don and by the end you're doing everything in white you've got a marketing complex you've got a mall, you've got a full businesses now that's a different kind of corruption potentially you open yourself up to but it takes some of this sort of violence I think out of the picture you're seeing this transformation now to get to Sarah's point I mean that's not necessarily the most hopeful scenario you know in the past decade as I've been sort of, it really has been a decade almost since I started working on this there have been a lot of changes in the United States when I first started on this project people said if only we could be more like you guys because there is some stuff going on in the United States there has been some shadiness but by and large there's pretty good reporting people can put pieces together if they were a quid pro quo now we move to a system where money truly has become dark that paper trail has gone cold you have things like Citizens United like super PACs where you can't necessarily follow A to B to C to D and so that I think is a real difference between the United States you know there's a saying and some of you have heard me use this before and I've never been able to find out who said this that the difference between the United States and India is that in India corruptions in the law breaking and in the US it's in the law making right and so I think that may be the path that India has headed towards sorry to leave you have a less than optimistic note purple tie thank you so much for the presentation and of course the book so in 2013 there was this case Lily Thomas vs Union of India which passed judgement that anybody who receives two years of imprisonment can't qualify as an MP or MLA in the assembly so do you think that leads a path where this system can actually inflict upon the crime side of Indian politics or is it just something that's in the book but never can be implemented? No man I think this is a good question so for those of you who aren't familiar in 2013 the Supreme Court of India ruled that if you're a Member of Parliament or Member of the State Legislature and you've been convicted of a certain class of serious crimes and a judge hasn't stayed on your conviction you're disqualified immediately you've got to give up your seat and that was seen as a pretty big deal and a way to sort of help cleanse politics now the problem is almost nobody gets convicted lots of people with cases but very few who actually see their cases through their logical conclusion and these things are going on for 10, 15, sometimes 20 years and a lot happens judges die evidence goes missing witnesses get cold feet these are all sort of the practicalities of real life and so therefore there has been a call for a reform that says look if you are an elected politician and you have a serious case against you that if you were convicted you would be put away for two years or five years and that case wasn't sort of when you were right before the election to protect against political motivation you shouldn't be able to stand for election at all until that's cleared up now that introduces another huge problem because there is the presumption of innocence before being proven guilty in India as a country where they have the rule of law so there is a modification to that which in fact that sometimes the prime minister has even talked about which says okay you're not immediately disqualified but we're going to take your case and put it on some kind of fast track course so that within a 12 month period, 18 month period those cases get adjudicated but you know the moment you put someone's case on a fast track you're implicitly putting someone else's case on a slow track right and so it's a hard bargain obviously to sort of strike and that's where we are, we're at this impasse where unless you get convicted there's very little legally that can be done a few more questions and then we'll wrap up I'm Sadanand Huma from the American Enterprise Institute so I'd like to relate this to something else you've worked on which is this idea of a balance between national parties and non-national parties now you could imagine at least in theory the rise of a large national party like the BJP which is not going to lack for resources is going to at least affect the supply side of your equation is there any evidence that national parties that are well resourced are less likely to rely on these figures or is that not true it's a great question Sadanand do you want to take another one or should we stop it let's take one more after you may I'm Eleanor Allison from from SICE my question is about the relationship between crime and corruption so your research seems to suggest that voters are willing to vote for someone with a criminal background because they can deliver but the 2014 national election and the electoral survey data suggests that voters were very upset with the corruption in the UPA too so what are your thoughts about does crime pay but corruption doesn't and then my second question is more broadly you've been looking at the electoral system for over a decade how would you describe the electoral system I mean in political science it's been characterized as a patronage democracy but it doesn't look like it's just that so is it a system in transition okay great great questions Sadanand's question on national parties versus state parties what the data reveal is that there's really no difference in terms of the prevalence now you have to remember that when a party like the BJP truly becomes a national force that's the ruling party today in the movie they're now contesting elections in more places than ever before so yes they're raising more money but they're also spending more money and so whatever they're raising is getting spread more thinly across the entire country as opposed to being concentrated in some pockets when it comes to corruption versus crime I think this is a really good question that I'm going to do in the last chapter as saying you know I mean this is maybe a subject for another book because it is it's an important question that I wasn't able to fully answer I mean my analysis and my sense of it is that politicians who are purely known in India for being corrupt don't pass muster voters now most of the people who are criminals tend to also be corrupt but they have something else that's going for them right it's not so the difference is they are not simply taking money from the state and putting in their own pocket for their personal enrichment now they may be doing that but they're also doing something else in addition right and I think that's that's the sort of difference where people are okay with you getting rich as long as you're proving yourself to be valuable to me in some way as a constituent then when it comes to the last question about transition I don't have a great answer to this other than to say that the story of India in some ways if you're thinking about the past well first of all India is an amazing experiment I mean never before have you had a democracy at such a low level of per capita income open up the flood rates to three and fair elections and have it survive intact for 70 years so that's one number two is the past 25 years have seen massive progress you've moved from a one-party system to a multi-party democracy you've moved from a closed economy to a more open economy democracy in cahoots with the Soviet Union to one where we talk about the U.S. and India being the defining partners of the 21st century you've moved from a social system where yes caste divisions loom large but increasingly as a marker of difference rather than a hierarchy but the thing that hasn't changed is the institutions right I mean the fundamental nuts and bolts of the state haven't changed and in some ways less of all those other things have put pressure on this element and that gap that's opened up is the cause of this problem so that's maybe the optimism I'll leave you with is that you know this is not an entirely a doom and gloom story right I mean there is a lot of a progress that's been made a long way to go and we can debate the extent and the pace and all the rest of it but the challenge for India in the 21st century right is that it's not going to be completing this institutional piece right and that's something which takes a truly visionary leader because that's not a task that's going to be completed in five years I mean that's again as I mentioned that's really a generational challenge well then I would say thank you so much for coming congratulations again to Milan thank all of you and there are books to be signed yes downstairs I hope everyone can join us for the reception thank you all again