The discourse of corruption normalises the inequality of wage labour. By encouraging us to focus on bribes, commissions and kick-backs - informal deductions in formal monetary transactions - it deflects attention from the endemic deductions of surplus value in capitalist production. Indian ’corruption’ has a further ramification, that of normalising the conventional forms of exploitation and mediated labour relationships in the so-called informal sector. Although the practices I have mentioned are not customarily placed in the lexicon of Indian corruption, they are in my opinion, the foundation of Indian modernity. At the outset of this essay I referred to the ideological function of a vision of society working entirely on abstractions - this means that the discourse of corruption can idealise a thoroughly regulated society, operating in the complete absence of sentiment and informality. It encourages us to believe that if only the fortuitous inflections of whimsical sentiment and human wickedness were ended, we would be liberated from ’corruption’. But no society can function in this way. What is at issue is not the existence or transience of the currency of sentiment, but its historically specific contents and the ends to which it is put by the commanders of class society.