Altaf Qadri/Associated Press

GHAZIPUR, India — On Monday, campaign workers of the small Quami Ekta Dal party in this sleepy agricultural center in eastern Uttar Pradesh state received some thrilling news: Their beloved party leader, Mukhtar Ansari, had been offered temporary parole from jail. He would soon be coming home.

Ansari, a charismatic legislator who in the past has represented the state’s biggest political party, is facing a slew of charges, including murder for the 2005 assassination of a rival gangster (and fellow member of the state assembly). He’s due back in jail on Feb. 9.



Ansari isn’t alone. At least 10 state assembly candidates in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh are presently in jail awaiting trial on charges that include murder and racketeering. In the current assembly, 139 out of 404 legislators are free while facing criminal charges.

Criminals and strongmen have long been a feature of Indian politics. Their ill-gotten wealth provides easy campaign cash, and they often control constituencies with strong caste or religious loyalties. Indian police are kept under tight political control, and are prevented from taking on politically-connected gangsters. Indian cops have been known to file false cases against opponents of the ruling dispensation. The courts move slowly against those who are charged.

If this outrages Indian voters, the results at the polls don’t show it. Armed politicians may seem distasteful, but they often serve their constituencies in ways normal politicians and government agencies do not.

Mukhtar Ansari was perhaps the most celebrated (or infamous) of a group of “Robin Hood” bosses who gained prominence in the 1990s. The grandson of an early president of the Indian National Congress, he was the man to see if you needed money for your daughter’s wedding (a crushing burden on poor families) or a government posting for your son. It’s said his influence kept the power flowing — and the electric looms running — in the textile-producing districts around Ghazipur when others endured extended blackouts. In the assembly, he and his his opponents battled with rhetoric; on the street they fought with guns for control of lucrative government contracts.

No matter who wins next month’s hotly contested election, a large number of the seats in the next state assembly will be held by politicians with rap sheets — or criminals who happen to be in politics. The election could help to make or break the central government in Delhi. Closer to home, millions of dollars in patronage are at stake. If criminal muscle is required to win, politicians and observers here tell me, so be it.

Last year, when workers of the Trinamool Congress Party in the West Bengal state complained about the induction into their ranks of a rival Communist Party cadre who’s been charged with four murders, their boss gave a chilling response: “The party cannot be run with writers and bearded intellectuals. [He] is our party’s asset.”

The current ruler in Uttar Pradesh, a state of nearly 200 million people, is Kumari Mayawati, who became chief minister in 2007 on a platform that promised an end to criminality in politics. Today, her majority in the assembly is maintained in part by 69 legislators facing criminal charges, including murder.

Recently, Mayawati expelled a close aide from her Bahujan Samaj Party after he was implicated in a grisly murder and corruption case. He was quickly snatched up by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The state’s second-biggest party, the Samajwadi Party, has so far fielded the most tainted candidates — 28. The Samajwadi Party is aligned at the state level with India’s governing Congress Party in an all-out effort to dislodge Mayawati. A victory in Uttar Pradesh would lead the Samajwadi Party to join Congress’s ruling coalition in Delhi, strengthening it ahead of the 2014 general election.

Some voters are repelled by this criminal infusion, which at times recalls the wild democracy of 19th and early 20th Century America (think “Gangs of New York”). One civil society Web site includes a color-coded “Crime-O-Meter” for politicians nationwide.

Others see these strongmen as a last line of defense in districts where economic and communal violence are a longstanding concern. A politician won’t save you during a communal riot, but a criminal just might.

“It’s very tribal,” a veteran politician told me. “People are voting for someone to protect them. Not to lead them — that’s something different. They want protection.”