Desi colours of corruption

I always felt that the word corruption needed a dictionary of words, a thesaurus of local terms and a contour map to show the changing nature of territory. We take for granted what we mean by corruption, rendering uniform the spaces in which it occurs.

Corruption deals with opportunities and restrictions. Restrictions can be artificial and yet real. When restrictions are converted into opportunities as rent, a bribe is born. Basically, corruption is a triangle of three states: violence, scarcity and desire. They all operate through the grammar of classification.
The wisdom of corruptions begins with understanding that classifications exclude and that inclusion can be paid for. Classification can create survival problems. By excluding you can eliminate. Imagine a villager entering a city. To enter a city and to survive, the migrant needs permission. He needs permission to stay, to ply his trade as a scavenger or hawker. He needs permission to live from the gangster, the tout and the cop. They are the first systems of governance he encounters and he has to pay for such governance. The first act of corruption is tied to the logic of citizenship itself. Society demands a bribe even before it expects a vote.
The informal economy is the next theatre of corruption. The Arjun Sengupta Commission report states that 70 per cent of the economy is in the informal sector. The logic is simply that 70 per cent of India is unofficial, illegal, informal, tacit, surviving on arbitrary permissions. The genius of corruption in India is in realising that poverty and marginality possess surpluses that can be extracted. The space between citizenship and non-citizenship is so large that the corruption economy has a gross national product larger than many multi-nationals.
Accompanying the informal economy is a more pathological aspect. This includes what I call the livelihoods which operate in terms of the forced division of labour. This includes child trafficking, prostitution, bonded labour, each of which creates a violence of its own, reducing people to bare life.
If the first structures of corruption emerge from the logic of citizenship, the second emerge from the logic of democracy and bureaucracy. Democracy creates opportunities for corruption. To be elected you have to pay and the others have to pay once you are elected. What links bureaucracy and democracy is development. With development, the state becomes a milch cow creating new opportunities for markets. The irony is development creates corruption which is doubly blessed. It creates a corruption of development markets and the cunning state creates a market out of disasters. The state is the dominant site of corruption. It creates not just a parasite state but a parasitic bureaucracy built around the PA (personal assistant), the tout and the very important person (VIP).
There is a baroquisation of the bureaucratic system. Instead of rationalising and simplifying access and claims, the state baroquises all procedures. Baroquisation is a process whereby more and more effort is spent on obtaining less and less. Corruption involved a violation or blending or two sets of categories. It merged the family and the state and secondly it blurred the public and the private. The ration card, the bribe, the tout, the adulteration and the file as a new form of rental were the hallmarks here.
Globalisation as a process was a realisation that the socialist state offered little freedom and fewer opportunities for corruption. Liberalisation opened up new opportunities. Crime was the first social site to globalise. Dawood Ibrahim in that sense represented a wave of innovation, moving from smuggling and real estate to a more systematic sense of crime. The gangster was turning corporate.
Globalisation also produced a critique of corruption around information. Transparency became the new fashion and the Right to Information and the Public Interest Litigation were greeted with enthusiasm, only to discover the new logic of corruption had shifted elsewhere.
Globalisation created new and hybrid markets for terror. One has to see terror as a commodity and a market. Terror deals with information blending anonymity in the fear it creates with access to the most intimate of personal details.
Violence is the wider commodity for the new markets of corruption. Violence creates its own markets through defence soldiers. Violence is a market which cannot afford peace.
The third market is around disasters. Disasters are no longer crisis events. The globalisation and routinisation of disasters has created an international market for disasters sustained by its own genre of professionalisms. Development in its new form of humanitarianism becomes aid to places of perpetual disaster. The new markets for corruption have a vested interest in the perpetuation and control of disaster sites.
The knowledge economy is the fourth site and by commoditifying knowledge one creates new markets for intellectual property. Piracy and regulation become the Janus face of this new corruption. Patents themselves are new forms of corruption. They legalise robbery from Third World communities too poor to legalise the legacies they have.
As one moves from control of bare life to baroque bureaucracies to liberalisation, markets become the new models of corruption. Our scams rotate around new markets. The 2G spectrum, the smuggling of Bt seeds represent battles around new forms of property.
The nature of middleman changes in context and style. The dalal who had an organic relationship with a community yields to the public relations officer and the lobbyist. Each deals with information in his/her own way. Each creates around them a logic of new legitimisation. The dalal and tout projected a sense of noblesse oblige, the lobbyist acts like an elevated combination of a plumber and research agency.
The diversities of corruption are impressive but the logic of the three streams is different. Each bears the marks of its origins and all blend to create systems of mobility for the corrupt. In an odd sense, corruption blends different forms of livelihood, dealing with lack not as a pathology to be cured but as a market to be addressed. One has to understand its logic and see whether normal systems can simulate these functions. Till we understand corruption is a parallel form of governance, reform would add little to its removal. That is its logic and its final irony.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist