Ethnographies of electoral processes and the neglect of fraud

Special issue: electoral fraud and manipulation in India and Pakistan

ABSTRACT

Despite official reports and widespread popular accounts of electoral fraud, manipulation, and violence in India and Pakistan, this topic has not been systematically addressed by the scholarly literature. This special issue explores how electoral malpractices are performed across a variety of settings (villages, small towns and cities) in criminalised political contexts. Our in-depth ethnographic studies of the electoral seasons show how fraud and manipulation of electoral processes are a diffuse and pervasive assemblage of practices, discourses and representations which shape and are shaped by local modes of governance and by the idea of free and fair elections.

Introduction

According to the report of the Electoral Commission of India on the 2014 national elections (ECI, Citation2015), over seventy-five thousand First Instance Reports were lodged with the police in connection with different kinds of poll-related violations; over three billion rupees in cash, six and a half million litres of alcohol, and almost five hundred thousand kilos of drugs were seized.Footnote1 Vernacular and national media outlets reported on a wide variety of fraudulent electoral practices. In Mumbai for example, two hundred thousand names mysteriously disappeared from the polling lists.Footnote2 What was true in 2014 continued in the 2019 Indian national elections. In the neighbouring country, Pakistan, the 2018 national elections were also marred by widespread accusations of fraud and irregularity. Ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif alleged that the security forces had forcibly expelled his party workers from polling stations, and that votes were being counted in secret without their supervision. He alleged that the military and the powerful secret services had pressured his candidates into defecting, and that they had initiated court cases against media outlets that were supportive towards his party. The elections were further marred by a terrorist attack that killed 151 people during an election rally, and by a subsequent attack on polling day in which 31 people were killed.

Despite official reports and widespread popular and media accounts of electoral fraud, manipulation and violence in India and Pakistan, much of the existing scholarly literature on elections fail to systematically address them.Footnote3 In Pakistan, with its history of military rule, its powerful landed clans in Punjab (see Martin, Citation2015) and Sindh, and its gang wars in Karachi (Gayer Citation2014), the literature on elections acknowledges frequent electoral fraud, but for the most part does not systematically analyse how it unfolds on the ground. Military regimes have frequently manipulated elections (see Martin, Citation2015; Waseem, Citation2006), and it is only in recent years since the end of military rule in 2008 that steps have been taken to empower the Pakistan Electoral Commission for the sake of free and fair elections. Nevertheless, there were widespread allegations of military interference in the electoral process in 2018. Overall, beyond media reports, there have been no in-depth studies of electoral fraud in the period of civilian rule subsequent to General Musharraf's ten years of military rule.Footnote4

In India, there exists a long-established tradition of ethnographic research on politics, and more recently on electoral processes, but here too the issue of electoral fraud has not received systematic attention. The literature on elections in India has tended to emphasise the enthusiasm surrounding elections, attested by high voter turnouts, the proliferation of political parties and candidates and by the frequently festive nature of elections (Banerjee, Citation2014; Jaffrelot, Citation2002). It has also been argued that even though Indian politics are often characterised as ‘dirty’ (Ruud, Citation2001), elections have nevertheless been broadly free and fair thanks to the efforts of the Indian Electoral Commission (see Banerjee, Citation2014). At the same time, however, research illustrates a tightening link between criminals, business and politicians (Jaffrelot, Citation2002; Michelutti et al., Citation2018; Vaishnav, Citation2017). However, we know little about how electoral processes in India are affected by the corruption, criminality and violence that pervade the political sphere.

Our aim is not to single out India and Pakistan as countries where electoral fraud is particularly widespread. While the scale and visibility of fraud may vary across contexts, we emphasise the fact that fraud, manipulation and even violence are central to electoral processes, and that India and Pakistan are no exception to this rule. As Lehoucq (Citation2003) has shown, the history of elections and of democracy across much of the globe has been a history of fraud, manipulation and violence. From Mexico in the 19th century (Combes, Citation2012) to the contemporary United States (Minnite, Citation2010) or Jamaica (Jaffe, Citation2015), electoral processes have invariably been marked by attempts to manipulate and ‘steer’ elections, using both legal and illegal means to do so. By describing the ‘types, magnitude, and determinants of electoral fraud’ (Lehoucq, Citation2003), scholars (notably political scientists) have provided historical evidence to the effect that fraud is intrinsically linked to elections (Alvarez, Hall, & Hyde, Citation2008; Birch, Citation2012; Campbell, Citation2006; Lehoucq & Molina, Citation2002 ; Schaffer, Citation2007; Schedler, Citation2002; Stokes, Dunning, Nazareno, & Brusco, Citation2013). The techniques used to steer electoral outcomes have included vote buying and clientelism, extortion, bogus voting, intimidation, the manipulation of voting lists, booth capture, and fraudulent attempts to invalidate election results. Other techniques include the deliberate spread of rumours and misinformation. All of the above forms of fraud and manipulation are deployed at different times during electoral seasons (See Michelutti, this issue; Govindarajan Citation2018). Whereas, for example, voting lists may be tampered with several months before elections, booth capture takes place on polling day, and punishing – sometimes through violence – and rewarding voters takes place once elections are over. Fraud may sometimes be overt and blatant, such as when party workers capture voting booths and prevent opponents from voting. But it may involve more subtle forms of pressure, such as through clientelistic bargains, overt displays of force and wealth by politicians, or even through planted rumours.

This special issue aims to provide a novel anthropological investigation of electoral fraud, violence and manipulation based on in-depth ethnographies of electoral seasons beyond polling day, and beyond the official electoral period when national electoral commissions begin to enforce their electoral codes of conduct. We define electoral seasons loosely as the period between any two elections during which politicians at various levels – national, state, and local – seek to consolidate their electoral chances for the upcoming elections(see Michelutti, this issue). It explores fraud, violence and manipulation as a vernacular assemblage of practices, discourses and representations that shape and are shaped by local political histories, and by violent modes of economic and political governance. Moving beyond the dominant normative perspective, we investigate the various meanings, tactics and politics of the electoral manipulation and the ways in which they are embedded within broader power structures. We examine how coercion, vote buying, and rumours shape electoral processes. We also examine how allegations of fraud are fabricated and instrumentalised. We look not only at how people use allegations of fraud to discredit rivals, but also at how leaders sometimes claim to manipulate elections in order to demonstrate their influence and political acumen.

This special issue provides nuanced and varied accounts of how and why people commit fraud – or claim to do so – by looking at different settings (villages, small towns and cities) and at a variety of agents active within them (politicians, political parties, henchmen, party workers, voters, etc.). Contributors have spent months and/or years in particular field sites and build on their ethnographic work to reveal the ways in which fraud is orchestrated, contested or legitimated, and silenced or displayed over periods of time that stretch far beyond Election Day. Contributors have either directly witnessed fraud, or at the very least heard and participated in conversations about it. Some have seen politicians and party workers distributing cash, alcohol and drugs. Other have seen voters and party workers being openly intimidated prior to elections, and then roughed up after elections if they did not vote the ‘right way’. All of them have had open discussions about the techniques of fraud with politicians, their henchmen, and with voters themselves. Some contributors were even invited to vote even though they were not legally entitled to do so.

Ethnographies of electoral processes and the neglect of fraud

Electoral manipulation and fraud have generally been conceptualised in relation to the ideal norms of liberal democracy. The notion of popular franchises through ‘free and fair elections’, has spread all around the world, and is today even invoked by populist regimes with authoritarian tendencies, like Turkey, Russia, Hungary or Brazil. From the perspective of liberal democracy – also espoused by electoral commissions and international observer agencies – elections can be qualified as free and fair only when voters can cast their votes as individual rational agents free from monetary or other inducements, or from pressures and threats. As such vote buying, clientelism, threats, and even diffuse social pressures all violate the individual autonomy of voters. To ensure individual voter autonomy, a number of institutions and procedures have emerged in order to control and evaluate the electoral process.

Today, countries are ranked according to their compliance with metrics that attempt to measure fraud quantitatively in terms of the presence or absence of certain predetermined criteria, and to indicate whether they are on the path to becoming mature democracies (Combes, Citation2012). Such quantification, however, relies on abstracting fraud from the social and political contexts within which it takes place, and risks overlooking the ways in which social pressures and power structures might affect electoral processes and undermine voter autonomy.

In recent years, however, scholarship has sought instead to explore local electoral practices within their social contexts. Following Schaffer's work on Senegal (Citation1997), and Paley's influential review of the anthropological literature on democracy (Citation2002), ethnographic studies of electoral processes have flourished over the last ten years and fostered the dialogue between political science and anthropology (Tawa Lama-Rewal, Citation2009 ). Auyero and Joseph (Citation2007) promote ethnography as the best tool to investigate politics, and to reveal an often hidden or ‘gray zone’ of politics (Auyero, Citation2007, pp. 31–53; Auyero, Citation2010; see also Brink-Danan, Citation2009, p. 6). This approach fostered a shift away from an exclusive focus on spectacular events such as riots and communal violence (Brass, Citation1997; Hansen Citation2001), political rallies and demonstrations (Auyero, Citation2000a), official parliamentary politics (Abélès, Citation2006; Crewe, Citation2015), and the analysis of election results, towards the study of everyday politics. How elections are implemented (Bierschenk, Citation2006; Obeid, Citation2011; Olivier de Sardan, Citation2015), what they mean to the people participating in them (Jaffe, Citation2015; Wouters, Citation2015) and why – particularly in the Indian context – people vote (Ahuja & Chhibber, Citation2012; Banerjee, Citation2014; Carswell & De Neve, Citation2014; Chandra, Citation2004; Ruud, Citation2011) are some of the issues investigated to approach the ‘vernacular’ meanings of democracy (Michelutti, Citation2008) and of electoral processes (Bubandt, Citation2006).

These detailed ethnographies of elections have certainly helped nuance the ‘universalist assumptions of Western democratic practices’ (Paley, Citation2002). However, despite a close attention to electoral processes, fraud, coercion and violence have only received scant or only indirect attention. The review of the anthropological literature on democracy proposed by Paley has, for example, only one occurrence for ‘fraud’ (Citation2002).

Firstly, the anthropological literature tends to analyse elections in terms of their ritual, sacred, and carnavalesque dimensions (Banerjee, Citation2007; Brink-Danan, Citation2009; Coles, Citation2004; Lazar, Citation2004), but tends not to pay detailed attention to conflict and violence. Secondly, scholars have focused on the role of clientelistic inducements during elections. The key issue in this research relates to the interpretation of material inducements and favours (alcohol, cash, access to schemes, etc.), as a form of manipulation or alternatively as part of ‘the abiding ties, in the enduring webs of relationships’ between party workers/brokers and political party workers (Auyero, Citation2000b). Some have denounced inducements as perverting democratic processes (Chandra, Citation2004, p. 4), others celebrated them as expressions of collective agency and citizenship (Lazar, Citation2004; Montoya, Citation2015).

Anthropologists have, largely, been critical of the purportedly central role of material inducements – see below for debates on vote-buying. Auyero's influential study of clientelism in Argentina (Citation2000a), insists that it is wrong – and stigmatising – to claim that ‘clients’ support particular politicians merely because these provide them with favours, gifts and even cash. In the Indian context, Banerjee (Citation2014) argues that Indians vote because they regard it as a sacred civic duty, and not necessarily because they want to get material benefits. Carswell and De Neve likewise argue that in Tamil Nadu high voter turnouts reflect people's political awareness and rights' consciousness: people do not merely vote to obtain material benefits, they vote along programmatic lines (Citation2014, p. 1040). In his work on the Rashtriya Janata Party (RJD) in Bihar, Witsoe (Citation2013) argues that members of the Other Backward Castes in Bihar voted the RJD into power in order to undermine upper caste power and to assert their dignity.

The move away from instrumentalist analyses of clientelism towards analyses that emphasise morality and rights awareness is an important one, not least because it nuances an overly stark emphasis on the role of material inducements as a determinant of voter behaviour. However, this literature tells us little about the threats and violence that can accompany clientelistic inducements. Piliavsky (Citation2014) for example, by emphasising the moral aspects of patronage, tends to ignore clientelism’s coercive aspects. This is problematic because, as Kitschelt argues, clientelism ‘involves reciprocity and voluntarism but also exploitation and domination' (2000, p. 849). Stokes (Citation2005) has argued that the distinctive characteristic of clientelistic exchanges is that they are conditional on how people vote, and that they involve ‘perverse accountability’. This means that clientelistic bargains often contain a threat in the form ‘If you don’t vote for me, you won’t obtain benefits’.

Various reports based on long and in-depth fieldwork by Chandra (Citation2004), Berenschot (Citation2011) and Martin (Citation2015) show how politicians and political parties frequently grant favours to specific categories of voters who voted for them and deny them and withdraw state protection from those who voted against them. For example, parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party might provide caste Hindus with hospital beds but deny these to Muslims.Footnote5 As Chandra (Citation2004) and Martin (Citation2018) illustrate, voting ‘the wrong way’ could also mean being deprived of police protection and therefore of physical safety and property rights. In landlord-dominated areas of the rural Pakistani Punjab, Martin (Citation2015) describes how tenants often vote according to the dictates of local landlords because they fear being deprived of support in their dealings with state institutions.

In this special issue, we seek to explore the role of such threats, as well as of intimidation and violence more broadly in elections in India and Pakistan. Based on the research presented in the various contributions, we emphasise the various ways in which violence, and the mere threat and rumour of it, shape elections in South Asia. This is particularly relevant given the reported rise of criminal politicians in the region (Michelutti et al., Citation2018 ; Vaishnav, Citation2017). Recent works have detailed the importance of bosses and their henchmen in extracting economic resources and in establishing political careers. In the Pakistani context, Laurent Gayer (Citation2014) illustrates how, after the partition, Karachi grew to become a city of multiple and heavily armed competing sovereigns who run parallel states and who extort money from their subjects. In the Indian context, scholars have emphasised how competitive elections due to an increasingly demanding electorate (in large part due to the growing assertiveness of the lower and intermediate castes), and sometimes also due to a proliferation of political parties, means that politicians have scrambled to obtain funds to finance costly elections. Politicians need funds in order to buy votes with cash, liquor, drugs, and sometimes even with small infrastructure projects. To obtain these funds, they approach powerful businessmen, sell party tickets to the highest bidders, extort money from citizens through the police and gangsters, and tap into black markets in drugs and liquor (Vaishnav, Citation2017). In many cases, industrialists have become politicians and politicians have become wealthy businessmen, illustrating how politics and capital accumulation tend to go together (Harriss-White & Michelutti, Citation2019; Michelutti et al., Citation2018; Vaishnav, Citation2017). In recent years, scholars have also begun gathering information that is more detailed on how politicians access different moneyed networks to fund their campaigns (Kapur & Vaishnav, Citation2018).

The growing role of money and muscle power inevitably affect not only democracy, but elections themselves. The way we look at fraud and manipulation – based on extensive fieldwork – emphasises the ways in which clientelism, coercion and money are all interwoven in the electoral processes. The large amounts of cash, liquor and drugs circulating, and the violence and fraud that frequently mars elections, need to be understood within a context where politics, muscle power, money and crime are increasingly intertwined. While electoral commissions dictate the norms about how elections should be conducted, theirs are not the only set of norms at play during elections. Moving away from a normative perspective allows us to analyse the variety of other norms and practices that come into play during elections in India and Pakistan.

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Special issue: electoral fraud and manipulation in India and Pakistan

Nicolas Martin & David Picheri