Anna Hazare Liberalisation and the Careers of Corruption in Modern India 19742011

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW August 16, 2014 vol xlIX no 33 41

Anna Hazare, Liberalisation and the Careers of Corruption in Modern India: 1974-2011

Matthew Jenkins

Matthew Jenkins ([email protected]) is at the History Department, University of Warwick, the UK.

This paper sets the Anna Hazare phenomenon in the

context of a longer discursive history on corruption in

modern India, examining in particular the JP movement

of 1974 and Rajiv Gandhi’s use of corruption narratives.

Far from being above and outside of politics as its

exponents would have us believe, anti-corruption

narratives are in fact inextricably mired in political

struggle. Corruption’s meanings and the uses to which

they are put have changed with the liberalisation of the

economy in India. This article traces the way in which

India’s increasingly assertive middle-classes have

co-opted the anti-corruption discourse and used it as a

tool to discredit their political opponents – the political

class and the poor.

Corruption is not new in India. Yet, the uses to which narratives of corruption are being put are novel. This paper attempts to sound these out by tracing the

consolidation of a neo-liberal conception of corruption in India, which accompanied the liberalisation of the Indian economy after 1991. This is not an account of any particular anti- corruption movement; rather, as a study of the evolution of anti-corruption discourse, it tries to situate the recent Anna Hazare phenomenon in a larger discursive history. That his-tory has been, nevertheless, intimately tied to political devel-opments in India over the last 40 years, and deconstructing the rhetoric around the Hazare movement establishes that the international anti-corruption consensus (hereafter, IAC) which champions Hazare (Transparency International 2003) is neither ahistorical nor objective, but is culturally and historically con-tingent. This analysis then enables an insight into the func-tions that corruption narratives serve in modern India and how these have changed since liberalisation.

To illustrate this transformation, this study examines the various careers of corruption in modern India. Starting with the 1974 anti-corruption agitation of Jayaprakash Narayan, the paper conducts a necessarily selective investigation of cor-ruption narratives employed strategically at key junctures up until the present.

The study fi nds that discourse about corruption, which is often viewed in the west as primarily an “economic” problem, has come to serve in India as a malleable instrument with which to castigate sociopolitical adversaries. But, corruption as critique is operative not only in domestic party-political struggles. Cor-ruption discourse is employed in a much wider sense by the winners of liberalisation to both consolidate their position and rationalise the lack of progress of the lower castes and the poor.

Furthermore, in this era of globalisation we see much inter-course between the national and the global; India itself plays a crucial role in maintaining the discursive hegemony of the IAC. As one of the emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries with a high rate of growth, neo-liberal logic demands that the lot of the Indian population should be improving (Cock-croft 2010: 28). The failure of neo-liberal economics in India to alleviate the crushing poverty of hundreds of millions of people thus demands an explanation. The liberal mantra is, therefore, that corruption is “the” problem as it “holds back economic de-velopment, prevents markets operating fairly for businesses and consumers, and further exploits already marginalised people” (Guardian Jobs 2012).

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August 16, 2014 vol xlIX no 33 EPW Economic & Political Weekly42

This assertion, by fencing off corruption as an area of ac-ceptable failure, obstructs any deeper critique of the validity of neo-liberal ideology in the non-western world and obscures the consolidation of structural violence in the global South. Because it appears to offer alluringly simple technocratic solu-tions to complex problems, the anti-corruption discourse has been seized upon by international institutions, governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social elites, all keen to prove that one need only tinker with the imperfections of the neo-liberal project to remove the roadblocks to its suc-cess. India, then, serves the IAC as a kind of litmus test of the universality of anti-corruption methods, and of neo-liberal rationale more generally.

Indeed, this redemptive quality of the IAC for neo-liberal theory explains the global signifi cance that anti-corruption discourse currently enjoys. By claiming to know neo-liberalism, including any possible vulnerability to “distortions” like cor-ruption, its advocates are empowered to shore up its intellec-tual foundations.

1 The 2011 Anna Hazare Phenomenon

Although Anna Hazare had led the life of a social reformer for some time, even gaining some national media attention (The Times of India 1990), until 2011 he essentially remained a regional player with limited infl uence outside of Maharashtra (The Times of India 1997a).

Hazare’s explosion onto the national and international scene in April 2011 as he launched a “fast unto death” against politi-cal corruption, therefore, took many by surprise. Not even Hazare himself had expected the “groundswell of support that emerged in New Delhi ...from a handful of people the crowd of campaigners became a few thousand on day two of the fast and in just a couple of days it became a movement that had sprouted in urban centres across the country” (Ananth 2011: 20). Suddenly this “obscure civil society leader”, previously considered “inconsequential” by the media and political elite, was being widely proclaimed a “messiah in the making” (Lam-ont 2011; Raghavan 2011; Subramanian 2011). A highly success-ful media campaign carefully constructed the “image of the 21st century Gandhi for the media age ...the Mahatma of mass media” (Joseph 2011).

In this air of heady bewilderment, a multifarious array of characters fl ocked to claim Hazare as their own – politicians, media moguls, captains of industry, the urban middle classes, and anti-corruption organisations like Transparency Inter-national (TI).

To account for the levels of support Hazare enjoyed in 2011, we need to unpack the Anna Hazare movement as a historical moment. This necessitates seeing it as a culmination of two interrelated phenomena: neo-liberal reforms in India and the parallel establishment of discursive hegemony by the emer-gent international anti-corruption consensus. Discourse in this sense is understood as “an ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to social and physi-cal phenomena” (Gephart 2012: 7). As meaning is inherently contextually and relationally constructed, within any given

discourse, like that on corruption, there are multiple rival and antagonistic narratives seeking discursive hegemony (Gephart 2012: 11). The relational constellations of these narratives in a “fi eld of discursivity”, variously nurtured or hindered by shift-ing social, ideational and material forces, change diachroni-cally (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 111). This suggests that corrup-tion, as a historically and culturally contingent phenomenon, is a semi-stable concept susceptible to change.

A historical examination of the careers of anti-corruption discourse in the Indian context helps demonstrate that the anti-corruption discourse has no inherent meaning. Rather, it is mobilised by political actors who, while they may be genuinely concerned by corruption as they understand it, are actually striving for other (sometimes unarticulated) political objecti ves.

This chronological consideration of the functions of this dis-course enables us to situate Hazare in a broader historical con-text, and answer the “why now” question so prevalent in 2011. It also allows for refl ection on the function this discourse is performing for the larger neo-liberal meta-narrative: this paper contends that the apparent explanatory power of IAC narratives, co-opted and mobilised by the Indian middle classes, has been used to shift the blame for structural violence to the victims themselves. To demonstrate how this became possible, we need to examine how the international anti- corruption consensus was formed in the 1990s.

2 The Consolidation of IAC in the 1990s

The end of the Cold War meant new priorities for the west; the strategic value of maintaining expensive dictators across the global South declined, aid budgets shrank and demands for greater accountability became louder (Polzer 2001: 8). Ortho-dox economic theories were largely unable to account for the failures of development aid pumped into proxy regimes at the height of the Cold War (Gallagher 1991: ix). Policymakers and academics thus began the search for “relevant variables that may have been overlooked in the fi rst waves of development literature” (Bukovansky 2006: 185). Corruption, previously regarded as a political issue, had been ignored, as institutions like the World Bank were traditionally wary of violating the political sovereignty of their shareholders.

However, as the neo-liberal “conventional wisdom that in economic matters government should not intervene” took root (Vittal 2003: 27-28), corruption viewed as an “economic” prob-lem began to fall very much into the remit of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Eco-nomic Co-operation and Development, and especially the World Bank. It was seized upon as the missing piece of the puzzle by these global fi nancial institutions, as it appeared to explain the failings of otherwise solid policies. Corruption became the “new star of the development scene”, and was “catapulted from the margins of academic and policy discourse to a position as one of the central problems facing the develop-ing world” (Bukovansky 2006: 181; Polzer 2001: 2). The estab-lishment of TI in 1993 embodied the institutionalisation of this nascent scholarship on corruption.

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As the discourse on corruption was being propagated by institutions which held a deep faith in virtues of the market, the prescriptions they offered should come as no surprise. Tellingly, the World Bank chose to defi ne corruption as “the abuse of public offi ce for private gain” (World Bank 1997b). In-deed, much of the global structural adjustment programme of the early 1990s was justifi ed on the basis of the ineffi ciencies and corruption of command economies. The World Bank’s World Development Report from 1997 (World Bank 1997a: 105-06) asserted:

Policies that lower controls on foreign trade, remove entry barriers to private industry, and privatise state fi rms in a way that ensures com-petition will all support the fi ght [against corruption]. If the state has no authority to restrict exports or to license businesses, there will be no opportunities to pay bribes in those areas. If a subsidy program is eliminated, any bribes that accompanied it will disappear as well. If price controls are lifted, market prices will refl ect scarcity values, not the payment of bribes.

This supposedly ahistorical and universalist conception of corruption was constructed in what Partha Chatterjee (2011a: 22) refers to as the “mythical time-space of western normative theory”, a realm which treats corruption discourse as external to “colonialism, decolonisation, debt and the international economy” (Polzer 2001: 13). In reality, the IAC is inseparable from key western concepts like Klitgaard’s construction of peo-ple as rational, self-interested profi t-maximisers responding to structural incentives (Klitgaard 1988). In this sense corruption is seen as a deviation from a normative ideal which asserts the supremacy of the Weberian bureaucrat, and censures his im-plied opposite: the chaotic and corrupt oriental babu.1 As an examination of anti-corruption discourse in India over the last 40 years demonstrates, any pretence at the universality or impartiality of this model is deeply misguided.

3 J P Narayan and ‘Total Revolution’

Any investigation into the perception of corruption and the function it serves in modern India must begin with a study of J P Narayan’s movement in Bihar. Initial student agitation in early 1974 against alleged misrule and corruption in the state government evolved into a movement under Narayan’s leader-ship directed against Indira Gandhi’s government at the centre.

In the 1950s, Narayan had become attracted to the teachings of Vinoba Bhave’s Sarvodaya movement, which advocated the Gandhian vision of a “rural-based society of small, self-suffi cient village republics where political power was decentralised” (The Times of India 1979: 4).

This called for what Narayan termed a “total revolution” in the economic, social and political spheres, necessitating a gen-uine withering away of the state (Nargolkar 1975: 59). Corrup-tion was pertinent to Narayan insofar as he viewed it as an abhorrent moral evil which sustained the unjust social order “with all its greed and selfi shness and denial of humanity, its injustice and exploitation and inequality” (Narayan 1957: 31). A “moral battle against corruption in society” was therefore required for the meaningful and lasting regeneration of Indian society (Nargolkar 1975: 118).

This very loosely-defi ned conception of corruption was de-ployed vaguely against any practices Narayan took exception to. Indeed, he viewed the capitalist system itself as corrupt, arguing that “wealth cannot be amassed except by exploita-tion” (Narayan 1957: 2). By the 1970s he was convinced that capitalist mechanisms had already infected those “at the top bureaucratic and ministerial levels”, and were the “root of [the] corruption that seems to have gripped post-independence Indian society like a hydra” (Nargolkar 1975: 174, 183-84).

For him, the inevitable consequence of motives of profi t and personal success was that “relief funds and foods are mis-used...controls fail, black market fl ourishes, black money econ-omy prospers without any check, legislators defect and change parties for a price” (Nargolkar 1975: 188-89). Importantly, the view Narayan advanced of corruption as pervasive amongst the Indian elite legitimised his demands for an incorruptible and pure Gandhian order. Only total revolution could reverse the “corrupting infl uence [of] a small class that played at poli-tics” (The Times of India 1979: 4). Once the village committees had assumed power, “the evil of corruption amongst traders, merchants, government offi cers and the rest can be tackled effectively...hoarding, profi teering and smuggling would be almost impossible for anyone to undertake” (Nargolkar 1975: 183-84).

Naturally, Narayan realised that such a bold enterprise as the effective dissolution of the state needed to mobilise “hun-dreds of thousands” of activists (Narayan 1957: 136). As early as 1956 at a public rally in Puri, Narayan called on every lis-tener “to leave every other activity and function and jump into this great task of bringing about a non-violent revolution in our society...we have to make everyone realise an economic revolution has to take place” (Narayan 1957: 24).

Despite his efforts, only several hundred rallied to the ban-ner of Sarvodaya (Narayan 1957: 32). His failure to muster the requisite number of Sarvodayans left him rather disillusioned, and by the 1960s he had turned his hand to other tasks such as peace missions in Nagaland, drought relief work and touring foreign countries (The Times of India 1979: 4).

In spite of his continual assertions after 1957 that he had withdrawn from politics, it seems Narayan never gave up hope for his total revolution. So when an opportunity presented itself in 1974 in the form of mass anti-corruption agitation in Gujarat and Bihar, he leapt at the chance. He told supporters that “the people had waited for a radical social transformation for 27 long years...The Bihar agitation against corruption and misrule was the beginning” (The Times of India 1975a: 9).

Narayan had begun to make overtures to restless student groups as early as September 1973, “testing their readiness for radical political action” (Wood 1975: 320). This bore fruit in April 1974 when the students asked Narayan to lead their movement. In effect, he now had his cadre of devoted follo-wers to implement total revolution. In anticipation of broader political action, students were required to do Sarvodaya work and educate the wider public about Narayan’s aims.

His anti-corruption credentials nevertheless remained the most successful means of persuading people to join his

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movement, and, recognising this, he was careful to stress that his movement was a “peaceful struggle for ending corruption in high places” (The Times of India 1974: 1). In depicting capita-lists as hoarders and the state as corrupt, Narayan had found a populist vocabulary which suited his purposes. In a speech on 21 March 1974 he demanded that the government “remove corrupt ministers and offi cers, improve the administration, deal fi rmly with the black marketeers, hoarders and profi teers, [and] take immediate steps to give relief to the hungry” (Nargolkar 1975: 96-97). “Corruption”, as an ill-defi ned pejorative noun, thus became Narayan’s tool to rally the critical mass he had lacked in the 1950s.

The support that Narayan was able to mobilise in the 1970s had, it is important to note, probably more to do with the political and economic context than Narayan’s demagoguery. By the 1970s, some of the failings of the Nehruvian develop-ment model, continued by his daughter in the guise of the “Re-move Poverty” campaign, were becoming apparent. On top of the costly war with Pakistan and a succession of droughts and shortages, the government failed to cushion the impact of ris-ing prices and unemployment (Wood 1975: 315). By 1974, the situation in Bihar was explosive. Social and economic under-development, population pressures and underemployment in the state led to growing hostility towards “politicians gener-ally, and to their self-serving mismanagement” (Wood 1975: 319). A typical contemporary view was that the “ineffi cient, inept and corrupt” Bihar administration “failed to give any relief to the poverty-stricken masses” or reign in “profi teering by unscrupulous industrialists, traders and merchants” (Nargolkar 1975: 4).

Shrewdly stoking public suspicion of corruption in high places in times of scarcity, Narayan was able to build on this restlessness to garner a large following for his own agenda. Shortly before the declaration of the Emergency, Narayan announced that “while the people wanted a clean and good administration, the country has been witnessing since 1971 only galloping corruption...The primary aim of the movement is to usher in a total change in the cultural, political, educa-tion, economic and ethical spheres of life” (The Times of India 1975b: 7). Narayan’s use of allegations of rampant corruption “at the top” must, therefore, be viewed in light of his desire to discredit the state and win support for his project of total revolution.

4 Rajiv Gandhi and Liberalisation’s False Start: 1985-89

Another Indian public fi gure who recognised the discursive power of corruption was Rajiv Gandhi. The ways in which nar-ratives of corruption were deployed under his premiership reveals anti-corruption discourse at the threshold between its pre- and post-liberalisation forms. Rajiv himself embodied the liberal school of thought which was to swell and underpin the consolidation of the IAC in the 1990s. The backlash against his liberalising impulses after 1986 can be viewed as the swan-song of the anti-capitalist corruption narrative in India.

Although Indira Gandhi had toyed with the idea of opening up the economy, she was always mindful to portray this as

furthering socialism. Rajiv, on the other hand, was more direct; “urbane, pro-western in manner, and technocratic in style”, he was averse to feigning socialist inclinations (Denoon 1998: 51). He openly declared his intention to introduce a new liberalis-ing economic policy in 1985 to strengthen the role of the pri-vate sector, reducing import quotas, tariffs and corporate tax (Sharma 2011: 150-51). Under Rajiv’s leadership, arguments for market-friendly policies began to circulate in mainstream political discourse, but they ran up against stiff opposition (Kaviraj 2010: 241).

Thus, as Narayan had done before, Gandhi used a particular narrative about corruption to further his political objectives. While Narayan had tried to use allegations of corruption to delegitimise both the state and capitalism more broadly, Gan-dhi was trying to justify his liberalising agenda to a sceptical public. Firstly, in order to lend credibility to both himself and his liberalisation programme, he had to overcome the Narayan legacy of corruption being perceived as pervasive at the high-est levels. He, therefore, worked hard in the fi rst few months of his premiership to construct an image of himself as a model of probity, sidelining former ministers like Antulay who were widely suspected of corrupt practices (The Times of India 1984: 1). A columnist recorded in 1985 that “by and large the people take him at his word. The popular view is that he is earnest and that he should be given a chance to prove himself” (Jain 1985: 8). He was, thus, able to use his initial reputation as “Mr Clean” to great effect, depicting himself as a new leader who, uncorrupted by the Congress system of old, would bring in a new era of prosperity.

Parallel to this public relations campaign was a more insidi-ous attempt to shift the blame for corruption away from politi-cians onto other groups. As part of his attempt to win support for deregulation, Gandhi pointed the fi nger for corruption squarely at India’s “14-million person bureaucracy”, arguing that it was “massive corruption at the bottom” which was the real problem (The Times of India 1985: 1). Corruption in the infamous “permit-licence-quota raj” was recast not as individ-ual moral failings and greed, but rather an inevitable conse-quence of over-regulation in a command economy.

Indeed, this represented a growing elite consensus in the 1980s, which held the state-centred development paradigm culpable for ineffi ciency, waste and corruption. The elite in-creasingly looked to the fast-growing east Asian countries and compared them favourably with India’s more sedate “Hindu growth rate” (Panagariya 2008: 98). Gandhi also started to try and mobilise the support of small-scale businessmen, who “complained most bitterly against small-time bureaucratic controls leading to extortionate practices and corruption” (Kaviraj 2010: 262). Once in power, he was quick to assure the business community that he would help them “grow faster” by scrapping what he called the “irritating inspector raj pestering the small-scale sector” (The Times of India 1986: 14).

Nonetheless, within two years, Gandhi’s incremental liber-alisation project was brought to an abrupt halt. Ironically enough, this was largely as a result of party-political allega-tions of corruption which damaged Gandhi’s credibility and,

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by extension, that of his liberalising programme. Details came to light in 1987 that top Congress offi cials, possibly including Gandhi himself, had received kickbacks when awarding an arms contract to the Swedish fi rm Bofors.

This was incredibly damaging to Gandhi’s positive public image; by 1988 three out of fi ve Indians were convinced that Gandhi was personally corrupt (Singh 1988: 8). The delighted Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed Gandhi’s assiduous attempt to construct a clean image “had been shattered ...the scandals have shaken the confi dence of the people in Mr Gan-dhi’s integrity and his government” (The Times of India 1987: 14). As one journalist noted, the liberalisation project had gone “into a coma ever since Mr Rajiv Gandhi got into political trou-bles” (The Times of India 1991a: 13).

To make matters worse, these allegations of corruption at the highest level coincided with a period of high infl ation which hit the poor hard (Sharma 2011: 152). Gandhi’s liberali-sation programme came to be seen as placing profi ts above so-cial obligations and neglecting traditional emphasis on allevi-ating poverty (Kothari 1986). The media noted that “disillu-sionment is growing” as it became apparent that “the new policy has reinforced dualism in industry, promoting goods of elite consumption at the expense of mass consumption prod-ucts” (Bidwai 1988: 8; The Times of India 1988: 17).

During the 1989 general elections, the new political opposi-tion to Congress, the National Front, was able to portray the government as self-serving, corrupt and neglectful of the country’s poorest groups (Gupta 2012: 94). Even though V P Singh favoured deregulation, as the convenor of the National Front coalition he sidelined liberalisation (Denoon 1998: 52). The election of 1989 proved that support for socia-lism and the accompanying distrust of “crony capitalism” had not yet been discursively defeated (Sharma 2011: 152).

5 Post-1991: ‘Full-blooded Liberalisation’

Nonetheless, in spite of this temporary reversal, full liberali-sation began to be implemented in India within the space of two years. Though this was largely the result of a confl uence of external global events such as the end of the Cold War and the fi nancial crisis in India in the early 1990s, Sharma (2011) has argued that these events alone were insuffi cient to create the domestic political support for continued liberalisation after the immediate fi nancial crisis had been stabilised. Instead, he contends that the new middle classes were instrumental in creating a vocal lobby in favour of market-orientated economic reforms (Sharma 2011: 155). Leading Indian industrialists, long proponents of “full liberalisation” (The Times of India 1991b: 13), were also quick to recognise the “critical role played by the educated middle-class in infl uencing opinion in the country” (Ezekiel 1994: 14).

Under Gandhi’s limited programme of liberalisation, these groups had experienced increases in real income, and they began to demand access to luxury international goods which only deregulation could provide (Patnaik 1985). Moreover, V P Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission in 1989, which imposed further reservation in public offi ce for the

lower castes, increased competition for the generally higher-caste urban middle classes which had traditionally dominated the bureaucracy. The middle classes consequentially became more amenable to liberalisation as they expected new oppor-tunities for wealth creation in an enlarged private sector. Exposure amongst the educated Indian elite to the growing IAC also helped propagate the conviction that corru ption could be overcome by privatisation in transition economies.

In the early 1990s, the middle classes, therefore, had high expectations of liberalisation. It was to be a panacea, increasing their economic power and reducing the seemingly ubiquitous corruption. These expectations were reinforced by assurances from the top. The then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh ar-gued that “liberalisation by its very nature works against cor-ruption” (Pani 1996: 16). Singh promised that liberalisation would trigger the

moral regeneration of Indian society. Over the years, the plethora of discretionary controls, confi scatory taxation and wholesale bureau-cratisation of economic processes have made our people excessively dependent on politicians and bureaucrats; a whole class of power brokers has cornered a disproportionate share of the national cake; smuggling and black money economy have fl ourished under such a regime. Deregulation and liberalisation, if pursued diligently and honestly, will bring an end (to) all these distortions (Baru 1995: 14).

The promised elimination of corruption thus played an im-portant role in helping pro-liberalisation forces in the business sector and the middle classes dominate the debate on the most desirable path to economic development. The growing ascend-ency of the neo-liberal narrative of corruption also meant that its educated middle-class advocates came to constitute the public seen to be opposing corruption (Balakrishnan 2001: 3).

6 Corruption and Development Policy since 1991

Liberalisation, it was argued, would also fi nally fulfi l the Nehruvian vision of eradicating poverty. Industrialists asserted that the

removal of restrictions and controls, reduction of the role of the public sector and the opening of the economy will eliminate poverty by free-ing the ingenuity of the people... All of these will produce a rapid growth of employment and income. That is how poverty will be elimi-nated. Programmes to subsidise employment or to provide relief employment will not be necessary (Ezekiel 1994: 14).

Increasingly, the middle classes were persuaded that the logic of the market, which dictated that self-interest leads to effi ciency, would help the poor, rather than the “good inten-tions of politicians and government offi cials” (Ezekiel 1994: 14). Moreover, they were told that once liberalisation had taken root “national resources will be more than adequate to provide relief to the pockets of unemployment and poverty that may still remain” (Ezekiel 1994: 14). Academics began to write about citizens as “customers” and the state as merely one of many “service providers”, insinuating that the state had no real obligations to those who could not afford to pay for the services they required (Paul and Shah 1997: 147). Laissez-faire liberalism thus meant that the poor need no longer be the tar-get of state intervention. Indeed, attempts by the government to fulfi l traditional developmental duties were attacked by those arguing for the sanctity of the market.

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The provision of free services in the name of equity has often had the perverse effect of creating excess demand for such services and attra-cting corrupt middlemen who divert these benefi ts to less deserving people...whether free or highly subsidised services are what the poor need deserves to be assessed (Paul and Shah 1997: 147).

All of this created a discursive environment in which the particular concerns of the needy were sidelined. By 1995, con-cerned commentators noted that despite “skyrocketing prices of essential commodities” which hit the poor adversely, “suc-cessive governments... have turned a blind eye to public wel-fare” (Gupta 1995: 14).

Nonetheless, the poor form a very signifi cant proportion of voters and their concerns could not be completely dismissed in India’s democratic system. It was in this context that the new IAC proved useful to those seeking to explain the circumscribed scope of the developmental state to those who stood to lose out.

Growing out of a concern about why western development efforts had failed during the Cold War, global anti-corruption institutions have attempted to position themselves at the cen-tre of the development debate. By asserting corruption as the central analytical category, IAC actors claim to be able to ex-plain the failures of the state’s development policies. Despite the existence of “several government schemes meant for poor people”, TI India (2011) argued that “deserving people are deprived of these schemes because they have to pay bribes to government offi cials”. In 1999, the president of the World Bank asserted that corruption was the “largest single inhibitor of eq-uitable economic development” (Wolfensohn 1999: A39), and western scholars have reinforced the view that “corruption erodes the capacity of government to provide basic public serv-ice delivery” (Root 1997: 15).

Corruption, as something which can be labelled, studied and even quantifi ed, provides a “legible” answer – a simplifi ed understanding of the complex problem of development failings (Scott 1998). Therefore, government actors began to mobilise narratives of corruption to explain why development policies in the free-market era were failing more than ever. Ministers, government advisers, and urban academics consistently blamed the lack of development success in rural India on cor-ruption and archaic practices of gift-giving and bribery among local offi cials (Gupta 2012: 136).

Vittal (2003), head of the Indian Central Vigilance Commission in the late 1990s, argued that corruption among lower public offi cials was the “roadblock to national prosperity”. He claimed that corruption restricts access to government services and, thus, “literally snatches food away from the mouths of the poor” (Vittal 2003: 30, 45). In 1997, the then Prime Minister I K Gujral himself claimed that corruption was the primary obstacle to development (The Times of India 1997b: 21). These arguments were largely accepted by the educated elite. Even the commu-nist intellectual Mohit Sen (1999: 12) agreed that “if funds allocated for poverty alleviation do not reach the poor as intended, the fault lies not in the strategy of poverty alleviation. The shortcomings have to be traced back to corruption”.

In this line of thinking, endorsed by the middle classes, poli-ticians, academics, higher bureaucrats and NGOs, the basic

policies of the state were correct, but literally corrupted in the implementation. Acceptance of corruption as the legible prob-lem of development efforts negated the need for a fundamen-tal interrogation of the appropriateness of neo-liberal develop-ment policies, such as microcredit to small farmers. The larger failures of modern development policy, which Schmitz (1995: 67) has contended are the result of “international systemic fac-tors such as exploitation, unfair markets and tariffs and inap-propriate economic reforms”, were sidelined.

The neo-liberal narrative of corruption, therefore, provided a site of strategic discourse coalition between IAC and state actors in India. While IAC players found their raison d’être in identifying areas of corruption in the localities, central state bodies were more than happy to shift responsibility for devel-opment failings to corrupt offi cials further down the bureauc-racy’s ranks. This narrative of development failure as a result of corruption has been used to delegitimise the whole develop-mental enterprise. Vittal (2003: 99), for instance, wrote that “corruption makes implementation of the so-called pro-poor or pro-tribal programmes totally meaningless if not counter-productive”.

The urban middle classes, as the primary speakers in Indian anti-corruption discourse, increasingly agitate against what they see as venal politicians trying to win poor and lower-caste votes through “wasteful and corrupt populist expenditure” on development (Chatterjee 2011b: 24). Sections of the educated Indian elite have also started to criticise the “appeasement regime”, alleging it “produces ineffi ciencies in the long run and eventually depletes whatever fi nancial resources are at the disposal of the central government” (Sharma 2011: 156).

Growing political mobilisation by the poor and lower-caste groups in the 1990s nonetheless led to some limited successes in slowing some harmful effects of liberalisation through legi sla-tion. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, for exam-ple, was intended to mitigate the problem of widespread rural underemployment (Vakulabharanam and Motiram 2011: 102).

In response to this nascent political consciousness on the part of the poor and lower castes, middle-class and upper-caste inse-curities began to forge the link between the failures of poverty alleviation programmes and the allegedly corrupt nature of the lower castes as a whole. Middle-class opponents, businessmen, and intellectuals immediately denounced the new Employment Guarantee Act as nurturing corruption. Business & Economy (2005) lamented that the scheme “guaranteed corruption” because “the so-called ‘upper’ castes [in public offi ce]... have been replaced by other caste elite”, a direct reference to the policy of reservation. The article asserted that the new policy, implemented by the corrupt lower orders, would “create thou-sands of millionaires because of corruption... across rural areas of India, petty politicians and contractors are literally salivating at the prospects of the new bill becoming law” (Business & Econ-omy 2005). Even in academic circles, it became increasingly acceptable to argue that it was “those with special needs [who] tend to bribe offi cials” (Paul and Shah 1997: 157).

This casteism has to be viewed in the context of a wider attempt by the middle classes to mobilise corruption stories to agitate

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for a “cutting down on budgets for health, education, sanita-tion, irrigation and rural roads” (Press Trust of India 2012). In this new corruption narrative, the poor, whose upliftment was previously the centrepiece of the Nehruvian state’s claim to legitimacy, were sidelined and recast as corrupt.

7 A Corrupt and Perfidious Elite?

Alongside this middle-class resentment of poor and lower-caste groups has been a rising anger at the political elite. Poli-ticians are held responsible for what the middle classes – who had been promised that liberalisation would end the corrup-tion, vice, and venality of the licence raj – view as a betrayal (Kumar 2011: 15).

By the late 1990s, the result was a growing consensus that the market economy had failed to get rid of government cor-ruption. Importantly, this failure was perceived as having lit-tle to do with the market, and a lot to do with the govern-ment. A Times of India survey found that a staggering 98% of people were convinced that all politicians were corrupt, but two-thirds believed that “further economic liberalisation will ultimately reduce corruption” (Balakrishnan and Chatterjee 1995: 15).

Increasingly, free-market advocates have argued that “kick-backs and patronage seem the very purpose of political power, not a perversion of it” (Aiyar 1997: 18). In this view, Indian politicians have distorted liberalisation to form a “plunder raj” (Reddy 2001), in which “the new rhetoric of privatisation and liberalisation can be used to serve the old cause of lining their individual and party pockets” (Baru 1995: 14).

The discourse of corruption has, therefore, become a means of expressing a rather inchoate rage at the political class, who are believed to have cheated the “common man” out of the full benefi ts of liberalisation. This latent middle-class resentment of both the poor and the political elite formed a reservoir of discontent which Hazare was able to tap into in 2011.

8 The Hazare Phenomenon Reconsidered

As demonstrated by this paper’s examination of the anti- corruption discourse’s mobilisation in three very different con-texts in modern India, the “narratives of corruption travel in time and space” (Gupta 2012: 113).

To comprehend the particular form it took in 2011, it is use-ful to consider Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifi er in the politics of discourse. According to Laclau, the empty sig-nifi er is a centre of “absence” within each discourse which binds all the disparate narratives together into one discursive forma-tion (Laclau 1996: 44). It is a nodal point, but one inherently devoid of meaning.

As Katju (2012) remarked in the Hindustan Times, the Anna Hazare phenomenon reminded him of a line in Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying noth-ing”. Hazare, as an empty signifi er, was a common reference point which enabled heterogeneous narratives to interact, and their proponents to form surprising strategic alliances. Arund-hati Roy (2011a) noted that under Hazare’s banner “everybody can happily rally to the cause – fascists, democrats, anarchists,

god-squadders, day-trippers, the right, the left and even the deeply corrupt”.

Groups with mutually antagonistic aspirations all saw in Hazare something larger – the promise of national renewal. They projected onto him their hopes for some kind of recasting of the social contract, which has been breaking down with alarming alacrity since 1991. The central unresolved issue was how this rebirth was to be accomplished and who constituted the “nation”. The splintering of the movement amid bitter re-criminations in late 2011 and 2012 seems partially a function of the contradictory ambitions assembled under Hazare’s banner (Jadhav and Dastane 2012). These actors each had their own particular conception of corruption, and in many cases tried to use these constructs strategically to further an identifi able political agenda.

The above consideration of the historical context of anti-corruption discourse in modern India enables us to identify the empowered speakers in the 2011 movement, refl ect on why they emerged now, and what function narratives of corruption serve for them. Analysis of the corruption narratives used by Hazare’s supporters reveals that they hold corruption to be an obstacle to neo-liberal nirvana. Corruption is viewed, along-side special considerations for the poor such as subsidies, employment guarantee and reservation, as a distortion of the market (Giri 2011: 14). These distortions are perceived to be fatally undermining the position of the middle classes in soci-ety as they bypass traditional chains of patronage between the state and its citizens.

The Anna Hazare movement is, therefore, best understood as a middle-class mobilisation of anti-corruption discourse to protest against certain trends exacerbated by liberalisation and deregulation, namely, growing lower-caste political con-sciousness and political corruption. The irony is that the move-ment itself was a culmination of processes intrinsically linked to market-orientated reform; it drew its support from an incre-asingly assertive middle class seeking to translate its relative economic affl uence into political infl uence.

There are some indications that Team Anna shrewdly atte-mpted to channel this middle-class anger against both lower castes and the political elite. In a move surely calculated to win support from middle-class critics of the appeasement regime, Hazare claimed that “development today is an illusion created by the government and at the same time people are being cheated into believing that development in [a] real sense is being carried out” (Hazare 2011a). Moreover, by directing his ire at the political class, Hazare was also tapping into the middle-class perception that the corrupt political elite had cheated them of the spoils of liberalisation (Hazare 2011b). The faith held by Hazare’s supporters in the power of the mar-ket is illustrated by the fact that their proposed Jan Lokpal Bill did not cover the private sector.

In the anti-corruption crusade, the middle classes, thus, portrayed themselves as victims leading a movement in the national interest. In this narrative of corruption, subsidies and reservation are seen to be “roadblocks to national prosperity”, but are nonetheless possible to overcome without the need for

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a fundamental re-evaluation of the foibles of the neo-liberal economy or even the caste system itself (Giri 2011: 15).

Helpfully, the IAC offers technocratic solutions to these dis-tortions, emphasising that corruption reduction is all that is needed to unleash the full benefi ts of liberalisation in develop-ing countries. By foregrounding corruption as a central expla-natory category, the IAC created a discursive reality in which the Anna Hazare moment became possible. Western academ-ics and policymakers had been arguing for years that corrup-tion in India was “an agenda in search of a movement” (Harriss-White 1998). IAC players like TI also provided their own vocabulary of legitimacy (TI 2003), in which Hazare’s follow-ers were the expected manifestation of growing civil society agitation in BRIC countries against corruption. The discursive convergence of the Indian urban middle classes with IAC actors meant that they were well positioned to impose their own dis-tinctive meaning onto Hazare’s empty signifi er.

9 Conclusions

The past matters in the anti-corruption discourse. Despite the universalist and ahistorical pretensions of the IAC, this is something widely acknowledged in the Indian context. Just as Narayan claimed Gandhi’s legacy of satyagraha, so too Hazare proclai med his movement the second freedom struggle (Ananth 2011: 21). While Hazare attempted to draw legitimacy from Narayan, even staying in his house in Patna in January 2013 (Press Trust of India 2013), this paper has demonstrated that this historical appropriation is clearly strategic and mis-representative.

Since liberalisation in India, the narratives of corruption have fundamentally changed. Narayan used the anti-corrup-tion discourse to justify a Gandhian/socialist revolution. His

movement was based around the belief that corruption stem-med from personal greed, which was “the root cause of all confl ict in the world” (Narayan 1957: 47).

Liberalisation has not taken place solely in the economic sphere, nor could it have taken place without an accompany-ing change in urban middle-class mindsets, in which rational self-interest and consumption are now held up as virtues. In the last two decades, these groups have seized the anti-corrup-tion discourse as a tool to discredit both the lower castes and the political elite, and thereby justify their claims to be the political nation. They are empowered in this enterprise through patronage by IAC actors, and are validated by theorists like Klitgaard who argue that the only way to reduce corruption is to harness the potential of rational self-interest. This appears likely to continue because, partly as a result of the function the IAC serves in “explaining” the failures of neo-liberalism in India, anti-corruption discourse has established a prominent role in the development debate.

The IAC, thus, buttresses the middle-class Weltanschauung, in which the problem of corruption is shifted away from the concerns of marginal groups, while simultaneously dismissing them as corrupt. Anti-corruption discourse, far from being above and outside of politics as its exponents would have us believe, is in fact inextricably mired in the murky world of political struggle. A prominent example was Ashis Nandy’s allegation in January 2013 that “most corrupt people come from Other Backward Classes, scheduled castes and sched-uled tribes” (BBC 2013). Simply put, by blaming the marginal-ised for their own predicament, it has become politically more feasible to ignore their growing exposure to structural violence as the neo-liberal state retreats from its previously leading role in development.

The Adivasi QuestionEdited By

INDRA MUNSHI

Depletion and destruction of forests have eroded the already fragile survival base of adivasis across the country, displacing an alarmingly large number of adivasis to make way for development projects. Many have been forced to migrate to other rural areas or cities in search of work, leading to systematic alienation.

This volume situates the issues concerning the adivasis in a historical context while discussing the challenges they face today.

The introduction examines how the loss of land and livelihood began under the British administration, making the adivasis dependent on the landlord-moneylender-trader nexus for their survival.

The articles, drawn from writings of almost four decades in EPW, discuss questions of community rights and ownership, management of forests, the state’s rehabilitation policies, and the Forest Rights Act and its implications. It presents diverse perspectives in the form of case studies specific to different regions and provides valuable analytical insights.

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Note

1 The World Bank claimed in 1997, for example, that “corruption opposes the bureaucratic val-ues of equity, effi ciency, transparency and hon-esty” (World Bank 1997a: 17).

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