June 28, 2018

Criminalization of Politics- a demand and supply phenomenon; Revisiting Where Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics

The world’s biggest democracy holds its biggest asset in criminality in its electoral politics.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” Is that perhaps the reason why we are witnessing increasing criminalization of politics in our democracy where one in four MLAs and one in three ministers face serious criminal charges?

Milan Vaishnav in his book Where Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, tries to systematically analyse this issue through the market logic of demand and supply of criminality. Connecting the dots, the author tries to substantiate the causality in the negotiation of the political power.

June 3, 2018

Kairana By-poll has message for everyone

There is no shadow of the doubt that the by-election of Kairana was known to everyone who was having slightest of the idea about the ground reality and demographic distribution of this region. It cannot contravene that the result of by-elections proved to be disappointing for BJP and they have lost few more numbers of seats in this election. In this backdrop, the meta-narrative has been building that NDA can be defeated by uniting all the regional parties which were adversaries of them either in the state or in the centre. Ergo, the prognosis is that they will merge among themselves to fight against NDA.