On the Usefulness of Goondas in Indian Politics: ‘Moneypower’ and ‘Musclepower’ in a Gujarati Locality

Abstract

This article discusses the cooperation between small-time criminals (or goondas) and politicians in a locality in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (India). Based on an ethnographic study of local political networks, this article argues that the regular co-operation between politicians and goondas is a product of the inaccessibility of the Indian state to its poorer citizens. The ‘criminalisation of politics’ is not a sign of moral decay, but a product of the difficulties of (poorer) citizens in dealing with state institutions and the specific nature of the local political competition that these difficulties engender. As local politicians need to develop their capacity to ‘get things done’ for voters, they need both the ‘moneypower’ and ‘musclepower’ of goondas to settle local issues, enforce their authority and manipulate voting.

Keywords:

• Criminality
• local politics
• corruption
• state-society relations
• Gujarat

Notes

¹This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ahmedabad between January 2005 and March 2006. During this period I lived in two localities in the eastern part of the city. The article is based on interviews as well as on a great deal of socialising which is usually referred to as ‘participant observation’: as I lived in the areas I studied, I had the opportunity to befriend many of the informants quoted below. To protect the anonymity of my informants, all names in this article have been changed, as well as the name Isanpur.

²See for example A. Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990); R. Kothari, ‘The Crisis of the Moderate State and the Decline of Democracy’, in N.G. Jalal (ed.), Democracy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.101–27; and P. Brass, ‘National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty-Year Perspective’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.18, no.1 (1984), pp.89–118.

³Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002), p.47; see also Paul Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).

⁴T.B. Hansen, ‘Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Public Authority in India’, in R. Kaur (ed.), Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), p.136; and T.B. Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also L. Michelutti, ‘The Vernacularization of Democracy: Political Participation and Popular Politics in North India’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol.13, no.3 (2007), pp.639–56; L. Michelutti, ‘“We are Kshatriyas but we behave like Vaishyas”: Diet and Muscular Politics Among a Community of Yadavs in North India’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol.31, no.1 (2008), pp.76–95.

⁵See Suranjan Das, ‘The “goondas”: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld through Police Records’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.29, no.44 (1994), pp.2877–83; and N. Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

⁶On the demise of Gujarat's textile industry, see Jan Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

⁷For a discussion of how our attachment to a Weberian ideal-type distorts our view of the actual functioning of states, see Joel Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

⁸For ethnographic as well as theoretical reflections on the nature of the Indian state, see Chris Fuller and Veronique Bénéï (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: Hurst & Co., 2001); Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, in American Ethnologist, Vol.22, no.1 (1995), pp.375–402; T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Hansen, ‘Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Public Authority in India’, pp.109–44; and B. Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

⁹Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p.76; see also Partha Chatterjee, ‘Democracy and the Violence of the State: A Political Negotiation of Death’, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol.2, no.1 (2001), pp.7–21.

¹⁰See Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860–1960. A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).

¹¹See especially P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: Polity Press, 1992); and P. Bourdieu, ‘Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field’, in G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-formation after the Cultural Turn (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999).

¹²P. Keefer and S. Khemani, ‘Why Do the Poor Receive Poor Services?’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.39, no.9 (2004) pp.935–43.

¹³For a more complete elaboration of this argument, and its application to understanding the mobilisation that takes place during communal violence, see W. Berenschot, Riot Politics: Communal Violence and State–Society Mediation in Gujarat, India (London: Hurst & Co., forthcoming 2011).

¹⁴‘Social workers’ is a term regularly used in localities like Isanpur. It refers to political fixers, i.e. individuals who use their political contacts to help neighbours deal with state institutions. They are different from ‘goondas’.

¹⁶Despite claims by politicians to the contrary, booth-capturing does take place in Gujarat. I have been present on one such occasion, where supporters of one party overwhelmed the few supporters of the other party, and where the election officials seemed to have been bribed. ‘Now even the dead people will vote’, a party worker told me at the time as he went in to stamp several ballots. Outnumbered, the supporters of the opposing party tried to limit the damage by proposing a three to one division of the ‘bogus-votes’. After half an hour the police came in to end this form of ‘voting’.

¹⁵This is not his real name.

¹⁷Cf. Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability, p.57.

¹⁸In 2006 the Gujarat High Court had a backlog of 3 million cases. Indian Express (10 April 2007), p.7.

¹⁹Suketu Mehta's Maximum City offers various fascinating examples of how goondas in Mumbai function as an alternative to the overburdened judiciary. In a conversation with Mehta, one Mumbai-based goonda advertised his services as follows: ‘If someone is sitting on your property, whatever is pending for ten or twenty years in the courts, we goondas will resolve [it] in ten days. Whatever the police, the politicians, the courts can't do, we goondas do. When people are tired of the courts, when they are ruined, when they are looking for a way out, they come to us and say, “Do something”. What you have forgotten is yours, we will restore to you’. See S. Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004), p.191.

²⁰See R. Wade, ‘The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is not Better at Development’, in World Development, Vol.13, no.4 (1985), pp.467–97; and F. de Zwart, The Bureaucratic Merry-go-round (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994).

²¹I have elaborated this argument about this dialectic between the capacity of the state to deliver public services and the strategies of various political actors elsewhere. See W. Berenschot, ‘The Everyday Mediation of the State: The Politics of Public Service Delivery’, in Development and Change, Vol.18, no.1 (2010), pp.885–905.

²²Bourdieu, ‘Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field’, p.58.

²⁴Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p.81.

²³It is in that light that I would interpret the macho behaviour and whisky drinking of the ‘political caste’ of Yadavs that L. Michelutti described in her ‘“We are Kshatriyas but we behave like Vaishyas”: Diet and Muscular Politics Among a Community of Yadavs in North India’, pp.76–95.

²⁵For a discussion of these two key developments in the political history of Gujarat, see Achut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva and Beyond (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005); and Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India.

²⁶Jan Breman has argued this point succinctly: ‘Having lost their mediated access to the municipal corporation and other state agencies as members of a powerful trade union, the former mill workers are now dependent on slumlords for the representation of their interests. To that extent the collapse of the textile industry has been a major cause in the criminalization of local level politics'. See Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India, p.211.

²⁷There were earlier large outbursts of violence in Ahmedabad in 1969, 1981, 1985–86, 1990, and 1992–93.

²⁸For descriptions of the 2002 riots and the participation of local goondas and politicians in various incidents, see for example Human Rights Watch, ‘We Have No Orders to Save You’: State Complicity and Participation in Communal Violence in Gujarat (2002) [www.hrw.org, accessed 31 July 2007); People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), ‘Maaro! Kaapo! Baalo!’: State, Society and Communalism in Gujarat (2002) [www.pudr.org, accessed 31 July 2007]; Concerned Citizens Tribunal (CCT), Crime Against Humanity, Volume 1 and 2 (Mumbai: Citizens for Justice and Peace, 2002); and T. Setalvad and J. Anand (eds), Genocide: Gujarat 2002 (Mumbai: Communalism Combat, 2002).

²⁹On the role of ‘riot specialists’ within ‘institutionalized riot systems’, see Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. I have argued elsewhere that institutionalised riot systems are in fact local patronage networks, and their operation during riots can be understood as an extension of their everyday functioning as mediators between state institutions and citizens. See Ward Berenschot, ‘Rioting as Maintaining Relations: Hindu–Muslim Violence and Political Mediation in Gujarat, India’, in Civil Wars, Vol.11, no.4 (Dec. 2009), pp.414–34.

³⁰Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, p.231.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ward Berenschot

For support and/or helpful suggestions the author wishes to thank in particular Mario Rutten, Ghanshyam Shah, Bram de Swaan, Jan Breman, Malini Sur, Nel Vandekerckhove and South Asia's two anonymous reviewers.