PENAL POPULISM AS AN ELECTORAL AGENDA IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.
The first speech after being announced the BJP’s Prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi paid tributes to the brave soldiers in at an ex-servicemen rally in Rewari and urged Pakistan to embrace the path of peace and leave the path of bombs.
On 3rd March 2014, he launched an attack on the law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh under Akhilesh Yadav government. He declared “After 5 years the system will be absolutely clean and all criminals will be behind the bars”. He also promised that “he won’t hesitate to punish the culprits in his own party.”
These frank words emerging from the mouth of the most popular political leader in India came as a breath of fresh air. When all the votes were finally casted and counted, BJP claimed a victory in 282 races and outright majority in Lok Sabha.
Similarly, Jair Bolsonoro, Brazil’s far-right president used his inaugural speech with the demand for a “national pact” to free Brazil of corruption, crime and economic mismanagement.
He was propelled to victory by campaign promises to curb Brazil’s corruption and crime. He won the presidential elections with wide margins against his opponent Fernando Haddad.
The 2016 general elections in the Philippines, a country who takes part in its electoral politics with great vigour elected Rodrigo Duterte with an unshakable faith that as a catalyst for change, Duterte can provide decisive leadership to curb criminality, inequality and corruption.
The three instances mentioned above reflect how, in the recent past penal populism has gained strength in emerging economies. Elections are no longer fought on mere ideologies or agendas. Rather issues like traffic, law and order, crime and corruption has taken a centre stage in in the political battlegrounds.
In this read, I would like to argue why is there an increase in the number of political parties and popular leaders who are relying on penal populism as a strategy to woo the voter. Are we headed to an era where the role of ideological reforms and informed argumentative debates have taken a back seat in democratic politics? This becomes particularly vital in today’s time when social unrest in the country is at all time high, Nirbhaya convicts hanging date has become a bone of contention, while Afzal Guru and his pleads are again in public purview with regard to Jammu and Kashmir militancy politics. Not to forget the recent change in ideology to penalise a particular religious community for the acts committed some 400 years ago. This concept of penal populism has taken its roots not just in general discussions but also among the political classes to please the masses. This completely erodes the principles of justice that forms the bedrock of our political legal systems.
Criminal justice scholars have often described penal populism as a process whereby the major political parties compete with each other to be “tough on crime”. It is generally associated with a public perception that crime is out of control and tends to manifest at general elections when politicians put forward hard-line policies which would remand more offenders into prison prior to sentencing and impose longer sentences. It generally reflects the disenchantment felt by a distinct segment of society — crime victims and their representatives — who believe they have been left out, or simply forgotten, by justice processes which focus on the offender. It leads to the pursuit of penal policies designed to win votes rather than reduce crime or promote justice.
Thus in our understanding penal populism is often considered to be a mechanism of mass mobilisation lacking constructive elements of other citizen movements. While restorative justice movement is instructive as it advocates the idea of the public as naturally punitive, programmes which involve citizen as needed resources for humanising mainstream criminal justice procedures is referred to as penal populism (Dzur.A)
Oflately we have seen an increasing tendency of political classes moving towards criminal politics. This is often regarded as the safest bet. Crime prevention is cited as a “good idea” by everybody. Nobody can argue that crime must prevail. Being against crime is considered to be a sin and as sovereignty is often equated next to godliness thus nobody who seeks to be in power would ever like to commit such a sin.
The sovereign would definitely like to be on the right side of morality.
In other words we can say crime prevention has a rhetorical power across all political spectrum.
Thus justice delivery mechanism becomes extremely important in all societies of the globe. Leaders want to create an image of being just, working for the welfare of their subjects and be considered morally right.
However, there is a difference between being crime preventive and conducting crime preventionism.
On the one hand where crime prevention is considered to be flexible, scientific and problematic. It establishes a cause and effect relationship, while on the other hand crime preventionism is a belief that social problems can be prevented rather than resolved.
The 2014 general election of India saw a widespread rhetoric on crime preventionism. This was done mainly in the backdrop of women safety and preventing increasing number crimes against children that were happening time and again. The then prime ministerial candidate, now the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had often said in his speeches that if chosen to power he would establish a number of fast track courts to put the criminals under trial to justice. This created a wave in the constituency that if Modi is elected to power it would definitely bring about a change in the existing law and order situation.
Similarly, in Brazil, the country was already suffering from an unstable economic regime coupled with widespread corruption and an increasing number of crimes against common man. Under this scenario, Bolsonaro provided the electorate with a refreshing change with his populist agenda to curb rampant corruption and crime in Brazil.
An identical case was observed during Philipino elections where both the contesting parties had framed their 2016 elections as a test to administration’s ability to curb corruption, bring about transparency and good governance. We must remember that the Philippines is a nation where drugs have become a major menace in the day to day functioning of the society.
The above cases point out that populist regimes are on a rise. All the leaders had banked upon penal populism in one way or the other. Either it as a fight against corruption or a fight against mafia or in general putting the criminals behind the bars. The whole idea of these electoral campaigns was to create a feeling of unrest in society. They created a feeling that there exists a problem which can be “prevented” if chosen. None of the leaders spoke of completely eradicating the problem. They just argued that there exists a problem and we will tackle it in a way that such instances reduce in their occurrence.
this form of preventionism focuses on symptoms rather than the disease (Coehen.) and be considered as a form of interventionist activism from public agencies in the private lives of people. It emerges from within the political arrangements. Preventionism thus becomes a strategy of governance. (Freeman.)
Such a strategy is often taken by those political pundits who believe that the current contesting candidate or the political party does not have an overall mandate or following of the population. In these circumstances, a lot of money and muscle power is used by political gurus to artificially stir a situation of crises under which they portray the contesting ruler to be a messiah of the distressed.
This is also often done to divert the attention from the contesting candidates otherwise contested image. It is often seen that such candidates possess extreme views and lack the morality of public conduct, thus under the garb of crime control the political parties often try to save the otherwise debatable issues.
This can be reiterated from the fact that all the three leaders in the above-mentioned countries won by extreme margins despite all three of them having a highly debatable line of thought and contentious ideas of governance.
It must also be noted that such kind of populism can only be executed in the societies where the electorate is not well informed, it is this society where votes are often traded in terms of short term benefits.
Profound knowledge gaps in the population reveal an inability to think critically and leave a person vulnerable to all manner of chicanery. The people are ignorant of many things. And this ignorance ultimately finds its manifestation in the form of bad electoral choices often making the most unworthy as the most trusted leader. This process has been studied widely by scholars across the globe. The voters today is often concerned about very trivial issues like free electricity and water supply. They hardly have a spare time to think about bigger and vital issues like job security, economic development, community marginalisation etc. Under these circumstances, preventionism settle its grounds. Crime becomes the biggest distraction which the society demands immediate redressal and quick response from the administration and the political class.
Several commentators have identified characteristics of ‘latemodem’ society that engender popular attachment to simple and tough solutions to crime. Social and technological change has left us bereft of traditional certainties and sources of trust. Family life, a job for life and even an after-life are no longer taken for granted, for example, in the way they were half a century ago. These wide-ranging insecurities which people feel in the face of rapid social change may be translated into concerns about the risks of crime and about threats to personal safety. Criminals become society’s whipping boys; and the criminal justice system becomes the whip. Another consequence of life in a rapidly changing and less controllable world is that there is less public confidence in public institutions, including the criminal justice system. In response to this shift in public mood, liberal democracies have abandoned traditionally paternalistic political styles in favour of more obviously responsive or populist ones. At the same time, mass-media representations — or mis-representations — of crime and justice have systematically misinformed the public, and encouraged politicians to respond to the sense of public anger about crime that they have fuel. The extent of public ignorance about crime and justice is now well documented. People tend to over-estimate the severity of crime problems and to underestimate the severity of court sentences. No wonder they have little confidence in the criminal process. However politicians have responded to public disquiet not by talking sense but by talking tough. The result is an increasing reliance on imprisonment as a response to crime.
Such a scenario is also propelled by the media houses which are often funded by these political classes to develop stories on the insecurities of the society. When a particular story runs on a loop, the general population is automatically tuned to believe that there exists a crises situation in the society and it must be tackled by whip only. In fact, public spheres are constructed in such a manner where the solutions to problems are also presented like the society needs a hardliner, who can manage the leash of the horses. Although such situations are detrimental to the functioning of a healthy democracy. But the rule of the day is such.
This kind of penal populism finds its ground further consolidated as even the developed countries see electoral mandate widely being accepted via penal populism.
Donald Trump of the United States, Emmanuel Macron of France, the re-election of Vladimir Putin in Russia, all reflect the increasing tendencies of the voters to elect populist leaders.
But its consequences would be far worse in the global south than that of global north. Some of the biggest reasons cited for this is that the challenges in developing world are far more structural. The developing countries are to still overcome the challenge of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, hunger, epidemics, knowledge enrichment etc. However as the elections are now being fought on trivial issues, it would be impossible to bring the real issues in the front. Votes would be cast based on anxiety and fear psychosis, rather than raising some real concerns of the respective societies. Penal populism has become a global trend, which although might be convenient for the ruling classes, but would be detrimental for the societies at large and developing societies in particular.
Possible future of penal policy
Mike Hough sees one optimistic future, which might be dubbed ‘the end of spin’. In this scenario, politicians recognize the need to respond to public disengagement with the political process. They accept that the ‘democratic deficit’ reflected in low voter turnout and cynicism about politicians is a direct consequence of populist strategies and of the ‘Punch and Judy’ debates in which politicians too often engage.
The ‘end of spin’ is a plausible scenario for penal policy only if crime trends continue to stay steady or fall further. Technocratic solutions to ‘design out crime’ could interact with successful strategies to address social exclusion in ways that yield even further falls in crime. These might lead to greater public confidence in criminal justice, providing enough space for a more rational debate about crime control and sentencing. But there is a more pessimistic scenario. The structural pressures on politicians in liberal democracies to double-talk may mean that ‘the end of spin’ evolves simply into a more sophisticated form of spin.
Is there an end to penal populism?
Given its origins lie in deep-seated social structural change across late modern society as a whole rather than mere local political opportunism, does this then mean that penal populism is an inevitable characteristic of late modernity? The answer to this question is that it has become a very prevalent characteristic of late modern society, but it is not an inevitable one. There are modern societies where it has not been able to make headway because their social arrangements act as barriers to it. However, as current indicators in these same societies suggest, these barriers are not impermeable. Even so, this does not then mean that there is no possibility of resistance to penal populism. However, for this resistance to have any purchase, it must fit the new terms of penal debate that have provided the opportunity for penal populism to flourish.
How could welfarism act as a barrier to penal populism?
The inclusive model of state welfare provision again provides high levels of stability and security and allows it to act as a shock absorber in times of dramatic social change, without the distrust and lack of faith that this has brought about elsewhere. For example, Finland suffered a deep recession in the early 1990s with unemployment reaching 20 percent, but this made no impact on levels of disorder, inspired no populist resentment against the government nor produced any rises in imprisonment. The state’s guarantee of well-being extends to victims of crime in this country. It compensates them and then attempts to recover this from criminals.
In this way, there is the opportunity for closure for victims, in so far as this is possible. This stands in marked contrast to those countries where there are now reparation schemes between victim and offender, with the state dropping out of proceedings. What these processes can lead to is the prolongation of victimization, to little benefit or gain: only 18 percent of reparation orders in New Zealand are adhered to. The sense of disenchantment and disillusionment that is likely to be the consequence feeds into support for penal populism and allows victimization to be politicized: victims become prizes to be fought over by politicians who try to outbid each other with the promises they make to them.
The barriers to populism are constructed out of local circumstances and histories — in just the same way that these may make a given society particularly vulnerable to populism. Even though similar disembedding processes may be taking place in these three countries as those where populism is strong, there are features of their social structural and cultural arrangements which are able to offset these and shut populism out. At the same time, just as penal populism itself is not constructed from one single blueprint, nor are these barriers to it.
It is only a well informed and an aware media that can fight this menace of penal populism.
We need media to sensitise the general public about the matters more critical to the development of our society.
Elections must be fought on real issues rather than superficial ones. Only then shall we be able to reap the sweet fruits of democracy and encourage a just, equitable and a truly liberal society, with harmonious coexistence of all the communities in the society.
