When muscle buys representation — The criminal political economy of Indian elections

The recent violent death of a gangster-turned-politician during the Bihar assembly election campaign highlights a persistent puzzle in Indian politics: why do candidates with serious criminal charges consistently win elections, and why do parties nominate them? The answers lie not merely in cultural acceptance or institutional corruption, but in a cold economic calculus that makes criminal politicians rational choices for parties and voters operating within a system of weak state capacity and “precocious democracy.”

Milan Vaishnav’s careful investigation into “money and muscle” in the book titled, ‘When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics’ gives us the economic answer: political parties prefer candidates who do not drain party coffers but instead bring their own money and “rents” – effectively turning the candidate into a net contributor to the party’s electoral budget. That explains why parties repeatedly nominate self-financing strongmen even when those candidates carry serious criminal histories.

Two simple calculations make this logic inevitable. First, running elections is expensive and parties care about maximizing wins per rupee spent. If a candidate can finance his/her own election campaign, mobilize voters through local networks, and intimidate rivals or crush grassroots organization with muscle, he/she raises the party’s probability of victory at low fiscal cost. Second, in settings where the state is a weak or unreliable deliverer of public goods, voters may value a candidate’s ability to “get things done” – whether through legal channels or not. That creates demand for candidates with coercive capacity who can provide security, enforce informal contracts, or ensure access to government jobs and transfers. Vaishnav shows this mix of supply (self-financing candidates), party incentives (win-maximization), and voter demand (order and access) explains the electoral success of criminalized politicians.

The pattern is not hypothetical. Recent analyses by election watchdogs, ADR, find that candidates with criminal cases often do better at the polls than those without. In the 2024 Lok Sabha contest, candidates who declared criminal cases had a notably higher chance of winning; and analysts reported that roughly 46 per cent of the newly elected MPs faced criminal cases. Those figures are not the exception but a structural feature of the contemporary electoral market.

The obvious question emerges, why does the rest of the system tolerate – and sometimes encourage – this arrangement? Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian’s concept of India as a “precocious democracy” propagated in the book, ‘A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey,’ illuminates the fundamental institutional mismatch at the heart of this phenomenon. India adopted universal suffrage before developing a substantial state’s fiscal and administrative capacity. India’s tax-to-GDP story helps explain the political economy: public resources available for universal service delivery and redistribution have been constrained, with tax revenue as a share of GDP stuck at levels that leave large gaps between citizens’ expectations and what the government can provide reliably. Weak public provisioning makes private, sometimes extra-legal, providers of order and services politically valuable.

Put brutally: when the formal state is thin, the market for informal governance thickens. Criminalized politicians fill a void – financing elections, delivering targeted goods, and enforcing claims in places where courts and bureaucrats are slow, corrupt, or absent. Parties, operating under electoral pressures and budget constraints, rationally nominate them; voters, facing everyday insecurity and want of services, rationally (if tragically) reward them.

So, what to do about it? The diagnosis points to three practical levers – and none is easy.

1. Shrink the market for muscle. Tighter, enforced limits on the role of illicit money in the election campaigns would make self-financing less decisive. To raise the cost of buying influence, transparency in party funding, strict auditing, and real penalties for illicit transfers may be encouraged. Strengthening the Election Commission’s investigative and punitive powers, backed by political will, is necessary
2. Expand the state’s capacity to deliver. Improving tax administration and raising the tax-to-GDP ratio is the key, so public goods and social protection can be scaled where they are most needed. Without more predictable public provisioning, voters will keep treating muscle as a substitute for governance.
3. Speed up justice and enforce political accountability. Fast-track prosecution of electoral violence and corruption cases, stronger disqualification rules for convicted representatives, and measures to prevent the laundering of criminal capital into legitimate party accounts can deter the most brazen operators. Civil society monitoring, voter information campaigns, and relentless media scrutiny also help raise the political cost of criminality.

Sceptics will say these steps are politically infeasible – after all, the parties that benefit most from muscle are often the ones with the power to block reforms. This is a valid concern. But political economy suggests leverage points: reforms that improve electoral transparency and expand public services change the incentives of parties and voters over time. Minor institutional changes can create a cascade: greater disclosure raises the reputational cost of criminality; better public services delivery reduces the citizen demand for private “muscle.”

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