Every time I read about criminals graduating to become MLAs and MPs, I am struck by how easily we gloss over this detail as an inevitable fact. As per reports, in the recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, 859 out of 4,853 candidates had disclosed criminal cases against them, of which 704 had “serious” charges. Yet ironically, despite a free and fair electoral contest between a conscientious citizen and a criminal-politician, often enough the electorate overwhelmingly prefers to vote in the latter. What follows on our opinion pages is pious commentary about criminals in politics and the absence of honest citizens. What is often little noted amidst these displays of civic high-mindedness is that the Indian electorate often has a radically different understanding than our intellectual class of the end goals of politics.
Not criminals, but doers
In a recent study about criminal politicians in north India, the anthropologists Anastasia Piliavsky and Tommaso Sbriccoli document that these figures are often seen as ‘doers’. In fact, they are often not necessarily seen as ‘criminals’ but as ‘toughs’ who protect society and provide public goods, stepping in when the state machinery creaks to a halt. In a way, this motif of a local hero who steps out of convention to cater to immediate social needs reminds one of localised divinities who abound across India. These ‘small’ divinities — from Aiyyanaar in Tamil Nadu, Jhunjharji Maharaj in Rajasthan, Kail Bisht in Uttarakhand, Jasma Odan in Gujarat — who are often removed from the ‘high’ philosophical traditions also accrue their worth in the social imagination as prolific ‘doers’ who defend the social order. These localised divinities stand often in contrast to the larger, homogenising, and transcendental categories of belief that the state calls ‘religion’.
What follows from such twofold valencies of belief — the local and the transcendental — is that individuals see little conflict in relying on two different ethical frameworks for evaluation of their lives. They evaluate the exigencies of social living in terms of efficacy, purpose, and performance, while on the other side, they think of their private lives in terms of the transcendental: what is duty, what is good, what is moral. This compartmentalisation of ethical frameworks is neither uniquely Indian nor modern. Machiavelli, for instance, was dismissive of early medieval Christian theologians who demanded politics be reducible to the personal. Instead, he demanded that leaders of societies ought to demonstrate ‘virtù’, a complex assemblage of potentialities which he described as spirit, force, ruthlessness, and an intent to get things done. The key metric in his calculus was efficacy of action. Machiavelli’s hero was a doer who doesn’t flag in energies, who bestrides the political scene not as a balm for our grievances but as a transformative presence.
Locus of investigations
In contrast to this view, the great contemporary philosopher of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre, thinks that politics is a means to arrive at what he calls ‘goods of excellence’ that are positive for all. This is in contrast to the practice of politics that maximises ‘goods of effectiveness’, such as money, prestige, power — goods whose possession may allow for greater efficacy of action but are not ends in themselves. Framed thus, Machiavelli sees the purposiveness of politics as maximising effectiveness of action to govern better, while MacIntyre, much like Gandhi, sees politics as a means for internal excellence. These two views have different locus of investigations: society and man.
When our opinion pages reconcile heavy-heartedly to fiery presences like Yogi Adityanath and declare that his appointment as Chief Minister is a defeat of India, what we see is this familiar clash of conceptual end goals. Our intellectual class views politics as a collective practice to produce citizens who value goods of internal excellence.
Meanwhile, for many Indian voters, still struggling after decades of misgovernance, democracy remains a means to identify leaders with ‘virtù’ who will produce goods of effectiveness. Their locus of evaluation is not the individual in a society but a maintenance of social infrastructure within which individuals can thrive. This is an analytical framework that exalts ‘action’ and produces a mentality that seeks protectors of that infrastructure. Our tolerance for goondas in politics is directly tied to our collective imaginary that thinks efficacy of action — of getting things done — is a virtue in itself.
The real puzzle of modern Indian history then is how did democracy allow us to sidestep Gandhian claims that saw politics as a site of moral refinement and turn to a more ancient intuition that sees compartmentalisation of ethical frameworks as a natural way to be?
