Corruption, yes. But where’s the scandal?

There is something about the debate on corruption in India that is distressing. I admit that a powerful drama is unfolding, that TV is offering a spectacle of a “fresh” corruption every week. Yet, what amazes me is that there is really no sense of scandal. The sense of outrage is at the level of a skit.

The reaction seems surreal. When BJP president Nitin Gadkari is accused of corruption, he merely suggests that corruption is a continuation of politics, and that recruiting his drivers as directors is a continuation of the old jajmani relationship. When Robert Vadra’s land deals are exposed, he receives a clean chit from the Haryana government even before a probe can be instituted. The gangajal of clarifications and clearances are sprinkled furiously on every event even before the public has had time to examine the event.
At another level, the trouble is deeper. There is a problem with the narrative. Arvind Kejriwal produces tales of corruption as a discontinuous serial, shifting attention to a new person every week. He never seems to focus on one person or case and follow it up. His pursuit of Salman Khurshid promised to be relentless, but after a quick climax one watches Mr Khurshid’s rise as foreign minister, while Mr Kejriwal offers a few minor editorial comments. He showers questions like confetti but has little that is systematic or systemic to offer.
There is a second split. Social movements that have responded to modern problems either provide a critique of development or a critique of corruption. The split between these two narratives has been lethal for Indian narratives on politics. The closest a movement came to providing a simultaneous critique of both was the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and Aruna Roy. The Right to Information Bill set the stage for examining both. By distancing himself from Ms Roy, Mr Kejriwal reinforced the conventional splits in political thought. His party has to provide an integrated critique of development and corruption and development as corruption.
There is a third level problem which tacitly believes that honesty and authoritarianism go together. The prime example suggested is Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Mr Modi’s authoritarianism is seen as a pristine form of honesty. Of course, few look systematically at his relationship to the Adanis.
All the above examples illustrate that we have not developed a proper discourse around corruption. The activist screams that corruption is scandalous and the politician replies that if one goes beyond naiveté, corruption in India is both necessary and normal. There is a lot of evidence that makes you feel this is true. Firstly, despite all the reports and scandals, few politicians have been punished for corruption.
In fact, there seems to be a link between democracy and corruption. Electoral democracy by alternating regimes provides for a circulation of corruption. Here democracy is seen as providing a new kind of distributive justice around corruption. Many of the rising castes seem to think their electoral victory justifies their turn to be corrupt.
Even Bollywood seems to testify to the normalcy of corruption. The good cop, the good father, the good teacher disappears before the interval and it is only the uncontaminated violence of the hero that is able to eliminate the corrupt villain. But even Bollywood draws a pragmatic line. The movie scripts clearly indicate that one can eliminate the terrorist or the smuggler but terrorism and smuggling survive as systems.
As a student of culture, one starts wondering whether corruption can be both normal and scandalous. In fact, no scandal of corruption has been able to sustain itself for a meaningful time. Whether it was Bofors or the Emergency, they all disappeared from memory like snowflakes in summer.
What we then confront are two conditions. Firstly, the narratives of corruption are never complete as stories. We lose the script somewhere and all we have is fragments or suspicion. Meanwhile, politicians treat a charge of corruption as an initiation rite to be weathered if one deserves a seasoned reputation in the annals of politics.
Worse, reform becomes a compost heap for corruption. Reform creates new possibilities and adds to the cost of corruption by making it more involute.
I listed all this because it is time to ask Mr Kejriwal and Co. a few questions. As a party, now like other parties, how do they propose to break the link between electoral finance and corruption? More critically, Mr Kejriwal has no theory of the informal economy. Corruption is often seen as the price the informal economy pays to the formal economy for temporary citizenship. The India Against Corruption (IAC) has no strategy to handle this epidemic of minor tyrannies around cop, clerk and tout.
Thirdly, the IAC lacks the stamina to follow any one case. It creates the spectacle of protest as media lovelies but has not been able to pin down one person or rework one institution. Meanwhile, it faces question about its own voluntarist past and those of its collaborators like Baba Ramdev.
I am raising these questions because protests against corruption mushroom by the dozens but die out quickly. It reminds me of what a famous activist fighting against dams observed. She asked the people, “You come to me when you need to survive, but in other times, you go to the MLA.” The listeners nodded that she was correct. They said, “We come to you when we need to survive, but we go to the MLA when we need to live. He takes care of ordinary problems which you cannot.”
I am wondering whether the battle against corruption needs to be fought differently. May be Mr Kejriwal and gang are trailers in a movie, still to be scripted. The discourse on corruption leaves the backstage of political economy and culture strictly alone. Given this, the movements against corruption cannot survive for long.

The writer is a social science nomad