This is a conversation which took place a few months ago. Posting it since there is so much on other websites. Sort of keeping up! Hope you enjoy it, and do add.
Subject: A conversation about corruption

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Friends,

I am somewhat puzzled by the emotion (staged reaction) and affect (primary reflex) that have arisen in response to Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption. I am using Sasheej’s rendering of the early Sartre’s terms affect and emotion yesterday at Pramod Nayar’s book release. Vasanta reminded me yesterday of a spiral bound book I circulated on the subject several years ago, when I was struggling with the moral stance of my fibre (luckily altered over the decade or so). This is also the apocryphal (not exactly, but effectively) essay Madhav talked about.

Perhaps preaching to the converted, and also teaching my mentors, let me repeat something I said to Moid yesterday while discussing the problem. My feeling is that as social scientists or cultural studies scholars we need to separate an affective/emotional response to corruption from an academic/political understanding of it. The moment we condemn it, we have a closure beyond which we don’t look. How would we begin to understand this?

The parallel (not necessarily developmental, but structural) which comes to my mind is (a deceptively clear notion of) the trial of Warren Hastings, and Edmund Burke’s speech at that trial. Burke was attacking the corruption of the East India Company’s mercantile advantage. In mercantilism, business was carried out by merchants who had a close relationship with the king carrying a charter from the king to do business. This gave them an unfair advantage in making money, and also made the king a very very rich man in post-feudal terms. Actually, from a very long distance and at a glance, it seems as if mercantilism actually makes the monarch feasible as a modern institution! Burke was known to be a conservative (and perhaps a royalist too?) but his moral critique of the practice of using the royal charter for mercantile advantage was a critique in the spirit of full fledged bougeois capitalism. It was an attack on behalf of free enterprise that ultimately supplants the favoritism that is explicit in mercantile capital.

In our context, the problem of corruption is rooted in the developmental hierarchy and its history in modern India. While clearly corruption has a long Indian history (from Hastings, no less!), the specificity of the phenomenon was preceded by the command economy, industrial license and a kind of structural favoritism. Now policy has a legitimate life, but the drive to become rich in capitalism has an organicity that goes beyond the law and the morality that is closely coupled to the law. We need to understand that law and morality as we experience them arise in tandem with bourgeois growth in the West as a facilitator of its dominance. It is a solution to the problems of bourgeois growth, not a fetter. Once universalized and exported to the colonies (even after development) it becomes a fetter. In order to understand corruption we need to understand the different process of wealth creation that arise in the context of capital. Only then will the Ambanis, and also the (hitherto but alas no longer) stainless Tatas, the Radias and others become comprehensible as the ‘despicable’ drivers of capitalist growth in the country. One wonders then what the voices of protest are about. No doubt the poor pay the price of corruption — but the cry against it is not going to reduce their price — they will pay any way, they always have. It is also true that laws are central to a functioning bourgeois state — but what is the mechanics of transition from a tutelary bourgeios state where the state grows administrators to be capitalists to the more energetic kind where the impatient many want to become businessmen and businesswomen any which way? It is not pretty certainly — Bharateeyudu’s (Indian) battle against the hospital that permitted his daugher (?) to die because he did not pay a bribe, is an exaggeration, only just. However, there are many implicit social evaluations to let die, that lie just below the smooth surface of moral outspokenness. Where is the question of caste in all this — I am sure it is there?
If this becomes a conversation, we might put it on the blog if everyone agrees. Any way, if there is somebody interested, do circulate this to them also.

Srivats

Dear Srivats,

Witnessing this upsurge of protest against corruption, I remembered this article on corruption you had written long time back but never published. I have a fading dot matrix copy.
Anyways, yesterday while driving back from work I saw this crowd with banners and a handful of cops standing by (a few in riot gear). I generally see those cops only in the university on Telangana-related protest days.  As I crossed this point I read the banners, ‘IT professionals against corruption’. Nothing significant except that I don’t remember these guys protesting against anything else. For that reason, this caught my attention. Also, there is no protest by the students in the university itself.
A few days back, I had asked my undergrad students to make presentations on topics of their choice (I still teach them this semester). One of my students from OBC background-Karthik-chose to make a presentation on Corruption in India. But, 3 minutes into the presentation, it became clear that he was speaking only about brahminism–and how it is hypocritical and how states lend their support to it and so on. Before I could actually intervene, there was loud shouting telling him he can’t bring caste into the class. But, more striking, one of the upper caste students asking him–what his presentation had to do with the topic in question? For the rest, I managed to control both the mercurial Karthik and the others–that is a different story.
Sorry about these disjointed thoughts. But am wondering how the fight against corruption has become a rallying point for the entire nation–even for the otherwise self-involved groups. But Karthik and his friends are suddenly silent. Or am I reading it all wrong.

Deepa

Srivats,
I read your mail. I agree with much of what you say and you say it so well. If getting rich or making , accumulating wealth is the order of the day, the norm of life, no matter who, what caste, community one belongs to, then no one can be called ‘corrupt’.  Caste, class, community and gender are no barriers.The problem lies in the distribution of benefits and losses, for the individual or  for the society. For me it is the loss of all aesthetic values of life.
Rama
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When I, Srivats and Shefali met Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi in 2008, I remember him telling us that he made a speech in parliament and suggested the govt that it should put a list on the notice boards of each office specifying about the tasks and amount required to be paid to the officers as bribe. According to him every body reacted strongly and rejected his suggestion. I think the point he was making was that if corruption cant be eradicated then it should be made a part of the system and spare the public from  harassments, confusions and painful negotiations.

The idea of corruption free world is a capturing fantasy. Every body likes to live in a world free of disease, poverty, fear, injustice etc and people have a tendency to wait for a messiah to deliver us to that world. But when that ideal world becomes a possibility then new worries emerges. For example I was thinking that in this ideal world people will be asked to follow the rule and go through proper channel. We all know how frustrating it would become since the rules and laws will be thoroughly used to pressurize, exclude, discriminate and marginalize the people. I remember the minority scholarship issue now. This year the govt formulated new rules to avoid its misuse and asked the students to submit a new income certificate from a new department. Where as the particular department has no information about it. The people are finding it extremely difficult to get the required certificate with in the deadline. According to an activist, this year 50 % will not become eligible for it and may not get any scholarship. There are other such examples which make the access of scholarship difficult.

In such situations corruption comes handy. It helps the people to negotiate with the system and makes them hopeful that their work will ultimately will be done. Here the question is what the corruption is in this case. The people who are bribing to get their work done are practicing the corruption or the officials who design new rules, which many times are impossible?  If the same officials tomorrow after  passing the lokpal bill will ask to follow rule and come through proper channel may cause extreme difficulties.

This sounds that I am favoring corruption but actually I am feeling worried about the idea of a perfect world.
Moid