South Asia Citizens Web

India’s trade unions ran a campaign for the enforcement of existing laws that safeguard working class rights. They won little by way of a media audience. Hazare’s flocks want a new law that will put the existing institutions of parliamentary democracy under the powerful sway of a body constituted on principles not of popular representation, but transcendental virtue. The agenda is clear and has enabled them yet again to capture the news agenda. But the law that has been drafted to realise it, virtually foretells endemic conflict with other institutions established under the constitution. The principal focus of concerted public action today, is a shifty, ill-defined target. And “corruption” is in the discourse of most of those who have joined the Hazare campaign, a term of wide amplitude, referring to a host of anxieties that have lately manifested themselves in the middle-class consciousness.

Multi-millionaire yoga gurus, Gandhians, fascists and rank communalists, retired bureaucrats, sinister coup plotters and you name it have all jumped this populist anti-corruption bandwagon in India.

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.

While diversion rates still remain high, evidence seems to point to substantial improvements in the public distribution system around the country.

Mr. Hazare and his followers Gandhian nor is their movement Gandhian. In order to follow a Gandhian strategy, personal interest has to be set aside and considerable sacrifice is entailed. Rather, the Hazare- led campaign is just a middle class movement, which appeals to the impatience of the middle classes and shies away from appealing to the people to earn the adhikaar to question an unjust system. It renders, mindlessly, the idea of ‘ people’ and the ‘ masses’ as automatically virtuous and right, without working for the enhancement of the moral and ethical core of individuals questioning an unjust system. Hazare and his followers are not remotely Gandhian because they allow the mobs around them to quieten anyone who dares question their means and methods.