The first Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize was awarded to Milan Vaishnav for his book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics at the Bangalore Literature Festival on Saturday.

The prize for works of non-fiction was established this year by the New India Foundation, which awards fellowships to scholars and writers researching the history of independent India, and fetches the winner a purse of Rs 15 lakh.

When Crime Pays is an in-depth study of “the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics”. While accepting the prize, Vaishnav, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained that six jailed law-makers being released to cast their vote in the no-confidence motion the UPA government faced in 2008 spurred him to explore the subject of the book, The Hindu reported.

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The jury for the prize is made up of the trustees of the New India Foundation – Infosys co-founder and former UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekani, historian Ramachandra Guha, Chairman and co-founder of Teamlease Services Manish Sabharwal, and Srinath Raghavan, historian and Senior Fellow at Centre for Policy Research.

The six books on the inaugural shortlist of the prize were: