Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  After having his attendants dismiss the woman, the councillor turned towards us.

  ‘She has no work . . . keeps coming and screaming in my office,’ he remarked.

  He then announced that the street Chirag had identified for his office location was for residential purposes only.

  ‘I would highly recommend that you follow the rules, but if you absolutely insist on building a commercial establishment in a residential area, we can help you do that as well . . . of course, for a price,’ the councillor explained.

  ‘Will I get a receipt for the money I pay you?’ asked Chirag.

  The councillor laughed. ‘No, no, there is no receipt!’

  ‘Then what if someone from your office later tells me that my commercial establishment is illegally built in a residential area? I will have no proof that I paid for it,’ Chirag asked, genuinely bewildered.

  ‘In that case, choose another spot for your business,’ the councillor advised with a straight face.

  Chirag immediately resumed his hunt for the ideal property. The property owners Chirag met over the next few months were just as bizarre, never missing a chance to make a quick buck.

  ‘Is this your property?’ Chirag asked one of them, Mr Marwah, while visiting a posh ground-floor commercial property.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ answered Mr Marwah.

  ‘What will the rent be?’

  ‘Rs 2 lakh per month, plus a one-time broker fee to me.’

  ‘If you are the owner, why do you charge a broker fee?’

  ‘My brother and I own this place. He charges the rent and I take the broker fee,’ Mr Marwah explained.

  There is indeed a cost–benefit analysis that plays out in favour of the corrupt in India. Here, the benefits of corruption, minus the probability of being caught, even taking into account its penalties, are greater than the benefits of not being corrupt. Trust plays an important role too. When the state cannot be trusted, corruption becomes more appealing to the individual. If he has trusted, established networks and relationships, then the individual further increases the chance of getting the benefits of corruption and reduces the chances of getting caught.

  A primary assumption of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work is that there is a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world and the principles that agents apply to it.11 In the vast body of academic literature on subcultural delinquency theory as well, it has been proved that once individuals live in a group culture where violence is the norm, it is hard for them not to become violent themselves. Similarly, I believe there are social factors that work through the individual, and influence their disposition to make them corrupt. Dispositions can be so strongly determined by social context that it is hard for the individual to escape the behaviour within that context. When consistently reinforced in certain ideas and acts, it is difficult for an agent to step outside that culture. Hence, it is difficult, often impossible, for the individual to get something done without resorting to corruption in India because it is embedded in the societal structures around him. It is for these reasons in India that it is not uncommon to hear corrupt individuals say:

  ‘Everyone is doing it and so I do it too.’

  Or, ‘I still think I did nothing wrong.’

  From the need-based network between the rich and the poor, which favours the wealthy, a causal path leads to the group behaviour of corruption within the network. That, in turn, affects the individual’s mental state. Based on this argument, the reason Chirag did not succumb to corruption in India was that he was an outsider to the need-based network in India, as he had never lived here. His mental state was still conditioned by the ways of doing business in New Zealand. In India corruption is not merely an individual’s faulty character.

  There is less emphasis on the individual than there is on community relations and affiliations in India, in both society and the state, and I have demonstrated this in great detail in an earlier chapter. We are deliberately taught—at home, in school, and by society—not to nurture the skill of developing our individual values (which is ultimately sourced from an independent mental faculty). Society dreads a free-thinking individual that may chance to think contrary to the socially accepted norm. Here, society and corporations are aligned in their practices. They want obedient zombies, men here want subservient wives, and parents want children who conform to existing social rules. So much so that it makes individuals wary of developing a rational and independent mental faculty lest they upset the accepted societal structure and destroy the system. Corruption is part of our social structure, and it will continue to be as long as the dominant groups in society benefit from it. Till then, every independently developed individual moral compass which might point to a non-corrupt course of action will be a freak case and an exception.

  In 2007, a survey by the research firm AC Nielson was carried out in Delhi about those aspects of society that had seen the least progress since Independence. In the survey, 82 per cent respondents said that it was corruption that needed to be eradicated.12 Rapid urbanization, globalization and the struggle for resources contrasted starkly with the masses of wealth accumulated by a few individuals. Everyone wanted as much wealth as others, angry about how a few had got ahead.

  By 2010, the frustration amongst these citizens escalated at the revelations of extraordinary corruption in the organization of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, the issuance of 2G licence contracts to telecom companies, and the corrupt politico-business nexus. Some citizens began to organize themselves into small-scale movements against corruption and a few leaders emerged from civil society. Modern communication channels offered citizens unprecedented access to information, resulting in a more knowledgeable society and greater awareness about the conduct of government and business.13

  In response to the public discontentment, the Indian government introduced a bill in the Parliament called the Lokpal Bill as a step to combat the problem. The bill stipulated that ordinary citizens could send complaints about corruption to the Speaker of the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of the Indian Parliament) or the chairperson of the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House). They, in turn, would forward certain complaints for further examination to an advisory body called the Lokpal, which would then send its report to the appropriate authority for action. The civil society leaders in India disagreed, arguing that the proposed bill did not grant the Lokpal any power either to initiate action or to receive complaints of corruption directly from citizens, and would hence be unsuccessful in combating corruption.

  Social movements in the Arab countries at that time in my opinion further encouraged these Indians to raise their voices and demonstrate against the Lokpal Bill proposed by the government. In its stead, civil society leaders proposed a Jan Lokpal Bill drafted by them, which they asserted was the credible solution to ending corruption in India. They then went about mobilizing citizens nationwide in an organized way, transforming roused emotions into what they hoped would be a large-scale people’s movement.14

  A group of twenty, brought together by Arvind Kejriwal, a former Indian Revenue Service officer–turned–social activist, mobilized tens of thousands of anti-corruption activists for a protest against the Lokpal Bill on Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan on 30 January 2011. The success of this event, the government’s hitherto unwavering stand on the Lokpal Bill, and the example of the successful revolutions in Tunisia a few months earlier, as well as the ongoing revolution in Egypt at that time, convinced Kejriwal’s group to step up their efforts. In Egypt, after eighteen days of protests, on 11 February 2011 the President ceded power. Simultaneously, in India, the anti-corruption movement across the country was launched at a scale that drew immense media and political attention. Anna Hazare, one of the members of Kejriwal’s core group, went on a fast unto death at a public space, demanding that the government concede to a mutually agreeable solution with the group.15

  A hunger strike is not an uncommon form of p
rotest in India. Mahatma Gandhi famously employed it against British colonial rule in India in the early twentieth century, and since then, it has been used quite often—for example, when activist Medha Patkar protested against the construction of the dam over the Narmada river. It is, therefore, an old and culturally well-understood form of protest by Indians. However, Gandhi’s approach to effective change was to act locally and stay rooted in one’s own context by doing what one could, where one could and where one had a community. Patkar’s movement against the Narmada dam also pivots on the same theory—rooted in the indigenous political culture, where action is local but has an effect at the power centre. This was not the case with India’s anti-corruption movement, which organized itself strategically and consciously across cities as a nationwide urban movement via a much-publicized, centrally located hunger strike.

  On 5 April 2011 at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a landmark symbolizing Indian scientific genius, Hazare went on a hunger strike, with images of Gandhi and ‘Mother India’ behind him. On the first day of Hazare’s hunger strike, a dismal crowd of only a few hundred people gathered at the venue. However, Indian television channel editors, covering the rapid spread of people-driven social movements in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain, got the perfect image of public frustration in India too—the sight of a pained and fasting Hazare atop a raised platform in Jantar Mantar. The media amplified this protest of a hitherto little-known social activist through heady comparisons with Gandhian satyagraha.

  As a result, over the following days, Indians from almost 400 cities joined the movement, believing that they too had finally achieved their own, well-deserved revolution in the spring, and hoping that the movement would ultimately result in the redistribution of wealth from their wealthier compatriots to them.16

  Hazare broke his fast on 9 April 2011, the fourth day of the hunger strike, as soon as the government issued a notification in the Gazette of India on the formation of a joint committee for the drafting of the Jan Lokpal Bill.17

  Over the next two years, Arvind Kejriwal, the instigator of India’s anti-corruption movement, created and expanded the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to ensure the direct political involvement of the anti-corruption brigade. In the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, the AAP emerged as the second-largest party, winning twenty-eight of the seventy seats, making Kejriwal the chief minister of Delhi. But with no party obtaining an overall majority, it formed a minority government with conditional support from the Congress. An important part of the AAP agenda was to quickly introduce the Jan Lokpal Bill in Delhi, but it could not gather support from the other major parties. In a dramatic sequence of events, Kejriwal resigned only forty-nine days after coming to power in 2014. The following year, in the 2015 Delhi Legislative Assembly elections, the AAP came to power again after winning a majority—sixty-seven of the seventy seats—in the assembly.

  Even though the annual Central Vigilance Report declared within a year that the number of corruption complaints against the government of Delhi had declined—969 in 2016 compared to 5139 in 201518—nothing much has changed in the private sector. Businesses in India are still rife with the usual biases, extortion and exploitative behaviour. However, the politicization of India’s anti-corruption movement, thanks to the creation and success of the AAP, has made the anti-corruption drive in the private sector a political issue as well. Political parties realized that the anti-corruption agenda had a strong grip on the emotions of the common Indian, so much so that the AAP could leverage those emotions to form a majority government in the country’s capital.

  Riding on this anti-corruption wave, in 2014, Narendra Modi won the elections and became prime minister partly on the basis of his promise to tackle corruption. But corruption is still thriving. The international anti-corruption organization Transparency International conducted face-to-face detailed interviews with a sample group of 3000 Indians between March and April 2016, and published the results in a public report.19 The organization found that 69 per cent, or nearly seven in ten interviewees, had to pay a bribe to access public services.20 The report ranked India as the most corrupt country in the Asia-Pacific.

  Modi’s 8 November 2016 decision to demonetize high-value currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000—which represented 86 per cent of the money in circulation at that time21—was presented as an effort to rid the country of unaccounted wealth and to push towards a cash-free economy. Modi reiterated several times that the demonetization initiative was part of a larger plan to combat corruption, and that the resulting economic system would provide for a level playing field to empower the poor.

  But in reality, the impoverished were the most adversely affected by demonetization. The most impoverished in India are unbanked and literally cash-less. They have no money for even one meal a day, and with a shortage of cash, they are the ones starving to death. They queue up at ATMs night and day. They do not have access to the digital economy, with no chance of logging on to the Internet and buying their meals online. Their lack of access to the digital economy is not their fault, but an institutional failure of wealth distribution efforts in India. Each of the hundred or so deaths that occurred while standing outside ATMs in the aftermath of demonetization was of someone poor—not wealthy.22 The woman who gave birth while waiting in an ATM queue was not wealthy.23 More than 90 per cent of the labour force in India is dependent on cash24 transactions, and they were the ones left starving to death—not the millionaires. On the other hand, the rich sent their minions to withdraw cash from banks, the wealthier folks had their cash locked in investments, and the wealthiest lost some of their cash in the ensuing raids—these were the stories that the media picked up and published as success stories of demonetization. India’s wealthiest either did not care or had privileged information so that they could stack up their cash in the ‘right notes’ in advance.

  Ultimately, corruption wins in India. There is no real incentive for any power group—politicians or businessmen—to mitigate inequality or the corruption that rides on inequality. We have not arrived at such a situation by design. There has been no conniving plan that India’s prosperity would be at the expense of exploiting our poorest, and keeping them poor. The development of our corrupt system has been organic, growing like a tree that expands and spreads its branches in the air, and digs its roots deep into the ground.

  After eight gruelling months, Chirag set up his small business in central Delhi. When he had set out from New Zealand, he had not accounted for bribes in his budget estimates, and on the eve of his company’s launch, that was the budget he had maintained. But there seemed to be one final threshold he needed to cross. On the day of the launch, he was faced with a group of unexpected visitors—transvestites in colourful saris, wearing fake gold jewellery, painted lips and thick black hair switches. They demanded money in exchange for blessings. Nowhere else in the world had Chirag heard of such a unique business model.

  ‘Come on, young man, give us some badhai,’ one of the transvestites said, while the other three rested their backs on the reception desk and clapped. ‘Fifty thousand rupees for us all will be good.’

  ‘Oh, but I have no money. The owner is away,’ said Chirag.

  ‘Tell the owner to come give us money!’ another transvestite insisted.

  ‘He is a terrible man, the owner. He does not even pay me,’ Chirag replied.

  ‘Listen boy, don’t mess with us! The consequences will not be pretty! You go give the owner this card,’ the transvestite threatened Chirag, thrusting a visiting card into his hands. The visiting card was in Hindi, and read:

  Koyal Rawat

  98716416xx

  Guru Koyal and Party

  Note: We warn you that in case any transvestite other than us is given badhai, you will have to pay us ten times the amount.

  The ultimate accomplishment in India is not just the accumulation of wealth, but attaining that wealth honestly. The latter is a tall task, precisely because we are all part of the nexus of nepotism, corrup
tion and extortion. The wealthy do not want to destroy this nexus, and the marginalized, such as Guru Koyal and Party, cannot afford to. The politicians pay lip service to an anti-corruption agenda, but that too, in reality, caters mostly to their own pursuit of power. The groups currently dominant in India have no incentive to mitigate India’s gaping income inequality. The rich get richer only when the poor get poorer. We are stuck in a system that is unyieldingly corrupt and most treacherous to the poorest.

  References

  Agrawal, Nisha. 2017. Inequality in India: What’s the real story? World Economic Forum, 2 July.

  Ashforth, Blake E., and Vikas Anand. 2003. The normalization of corruption in organizations. Research in Organizational Behaviour, pp. 1–52.

  Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J.D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

  Chatterji, Miniya. 2012. The globalization of politics: From Egypt to India. Social Movement Studies, pp. 96–102.

  Daily Mail. 2016. As population soars, India battles to tame malnutrition. 2016. 7 January.

  De Graaf, Gjalt. 2007. Causes of corruption: Towards a contextual theory of corruption. Public Administration Quarterly, p. 71.

  DiRienzo, Cassandra E. et al. 2007. Corruption and the role of information. Journal of International Business Studies, pp. 320–332.

  Financial Express. 2016. Pregnant woman delivers baby standing outside ATM machine kiosk. December 4.

  Giri, Saroj. 2011. Where is India’s Tahrir Square? Open Democracy, 17 February.

  Government of India. 2014. The Gazette of India. http://ccis.nic.in/WriteReadData/CircularPortal/D2/D02ser/407_06_2013-AVD-IV-09012014.pdf.

  Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken modernity: India between worlds (Noida: HarperCollins India).

  Hindustan Times. 2017. CVC report on dip in corruption shows people’s level of satisfaction with AAP: Sisodia. 16 April.