Mukhtar Ansari’s ‘Death’ and Breeding of Criminal Politics

The “death” of Mukhtar Ansari, MLA from Mau, in Uttar Pradesh on March 28, 2024, and the response it generated is living testimony of the deeper ethical crisis that identity politics stares at in the Hindi heartland. This crisis is not that of party politics. It is a long-drawn social crisis where all workings of constitutionalism are subordinated and, in many cases, obliterated from the way politics is done.

If it was merely a question of one party, in this case, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then once another party takes over, we can feel relieved. But, it's a long-drawn crisis precisely because criminality has long been the instrument of accumulating power in the region. It is a product of breakdown of civic imagination around associationalism and dialogue, replaced with criminality and retribution.

In criminal politics, the only appearance of resolving tension comes with violence and counter-violence. In cases like Ansari's death, the general public naturally feels that the State has a hand in it. In many cases, it is celebrated as a muscular policy against “appeasement”. Then law and order get interpreted as State-sanctioned criminality keeping social criminality in check, turning constitutionalism on its head. This is the trap the parties like Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), etc., find themselves in, let alone mounting a challenge to BJP’s politics. This is the cycle even socially progressive activists are finding themselves trapped in, they are forced to either remain silent or take sides with the criminals. 

It is the hollowing out of ethical imagination, which is stopping a genuinely progressive constitutional arrangement to emerge. Even as the public has come to accept the obvious, there's simply no other moral standard to critique this criminal politics from.

The consent for criminal politics primarily comes from the fact that every single political party has sought to use violence as the basis of legitimacy and power. It hardly makes a difference when a ruling party is changed with another party, for, after all, there seems to exist a consensus around criminal politics.

Jeffrey Witsoe, a political anthropologist, in his seminal work “Democracy Against Development”, framed India's post-colonial democracy as a sight of violent caste-based political movements against a bureaucratic developmental State dominated by the upper castes. For the ordinary lot, including the Dalit-Bahujans and Muslims, these political movements have hardly helped in expanding their democratic agency. Instead, they are forced to choose between parties who are either indifferent to their anxieties or lecture them about how to perceive their “victimhood”.

Political parties like SP and BSP find themselves in a dilemma over retaining legitimacy from their core social base without risking being called "appeasement." When every form of violence, be it committed by the Dalit-Bahujans or Muslims gets framed as assertion against the social power of the dominant castes, then by default social activists are forced to side with the criminals like Ansari. While SP was correct in critiquing BJP's ‘bulldozer politics’ and encounters as targeting the subaltern groups, it is silent on the question of criminality itself. BJP is using the profound distrust of institutions to subordinate every working of constitutionalism to criminal power. 

This is the price we are paying for critiquing constitutional morality as bourgeois morality and social ethics as brahmanical. The issue is not so much in the critique itself but with what is it being replaced. It is to be reminded of what Enrico Berlinguer, a key figure of European Communism, said and presciently so... "we replace bourgeois morality with amorality at our own peril."

The further breeding of criminal politics is also due to the absence of sustained intervention by social activists in forging consensus among the social groups against competitive criminality and not reducing politics to mere representation. It could be argued that party politics is driven by power. What stopped the activists from critiquing the excesses of power politics?

The logic of representation with criminal content has produced a sense of collective disempowerment among all social groups. It has hollowed out any possibility of genuine social solidarity to emerge among the social groups. It is a tragedy that what started off as an anti-caste assertion is now forced to bite its own dust. Genuine solidarities come from the civic ethics of mutuality, both in criticism and speaking for one another. It is a way to check the excesses of community power. In the absence of such an imagination, violence becomes the only way to move out of difference of opinion or interests. 

What identity politics with criminal content has done is that it has made the social groups fall into the trap of accepting political pragmatism without ethics as agency. This has given leeway to parties like AIMIM (All India Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen) to promote exclusive Muslim identity and BJP, Hindutva politics. Dalit-Bahujans have largely come to support BJP not due to any radical social agenda that helps them to move out of this crisis. But because BJP and its politics has repurposed identity claims to build anti-Muslim politics. It is not difficult for BJP to argue that they are taking the illegally accumulated lands of Muslim gangsters and using it to provide houses to the Dalits and OBCs. Why would the Dalit-Bahujans refuse to accept this politics in such a case?

Social activists, therefore, should forcefully provide a social critique of criminal politics and link it to economic deprivation, which is a first minimal step in reclaiming the political subjectivity around civic imagination. It has to come out of the fear of losing legitimacy when critiquing criminality, be it of the dominant castes or the subaltern groups.

It is clear at this point of time that consociational power sharing can coexist with criminal politics. Ambedkar warned that without social democracy, political democracy will collapse. The post-colonial reality of our times is such that it is increasingly unclear as to what is the socially concrete form the “lofty” principles of justice, equality and democracy take.

Retrospectively, we should ask, was there anything normatively exceptional about the “second democratic upsurge”?

The writer is a student of politics and society based in New Delhi, India. The views are personal.