From a Murder to Deaths in the Morcha

Abstract

This chapter explores the responses to two questions. The first asks how criminalized politics and its associated violence came to administer the limits of artistic expression in the country, and in doing so, hampered or reformed the systemic order of constitutional politics. The second explores what implications this had for the sustenance of democratic processes (given that regulation of freedom of speech and expression is an aspect that is apparently fundamental to the regulatory role of a democratic state). The idea is not to conclude whether criminalized politics and its ensuing violence are themselves democratic or not. Instead, what we can understand from these questions is the extent to which criminalization and violence gradually acquired salience in the narrative and functioning of India’s liberal democracy, no longer inviting punishment or being regarded as anomalies or as impediments to governance. Based on two case studies, the chapter examines two different aspects of the politico-criminal nexus: one of patronage, which pertains to the opportunism of violent actions undertaken by cadres of criminals and local strongmen as pawns in the game of power politics; and the other of partnership that relates to the subversive ritualism of para-statal organizations like the mafia, on whom the state relies, but with whom it also competes for domination.