An Indian Summer: Corruption, Class, and the Lokpal Protests

Article Journal of Consumer Culture 2015, Vol. 15(2) 221–247 ! The Author(s) 2013 An Indian summer: Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Corruption, class, and DOI: 10.1177/1469540513498614 the Lokpal protests joc.sagepub.com Aalok Khandekar Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands Deepa S Reddy Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Houston-Clear Lake, USA and Human Factors International Abstract In the summer of 2011, in the wake of some of India’s worst corruption scandals, a civil society group calling itself India Against Corruption was mobilizing unprecedented nation- wide support for the passage of a strong Jan Lokpal (Citizen’s Ombudsman) Bill by the Indian Parliament. The movement was, on its face, unusual: its figurehead, the 75-year- old Gandhian, Anna Hazare, was apparently rallying urban, middle-class professionals and youth in great numbers—a group otherwise notorious for its political apathy. The scale of the protests, of the scandals spurring them, and the intensity of media attention generated nothing short of a spectacle: the sense, if not the reality, of a united India Against Corruption. Against this background, we ask: what shared imagination of corruption and political dysfunction, and what political ends are projected in the Lokpal protests? What are the class practices gathered under the ‘‘middle-class’’ rubric, and how do these characterize the unusual politics of summer 2011? Wholly permeated by routine habits of consumption, we argue that the Lokpal protests are fundamentally structured by the impulse to remake social relations in the image of products and ‘‘India’’ itself into a trusted brand. Taking ‘‘corruption’’ as a site at which the middle class discursively constitutes itself, we trace the idioms and mechanisms by which the Lokpal agitation re-articulates the very terms of politics, citizenship, and democracy in contemporary India. Keywords Brands, consumption, corruption, Gandhi, India, liberalization, middle class, political protests Corresponding author: Aalok Khandekar, Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from joc.sagepub.com by guest on August 26, 2015 222 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(2) The gathering Sometime in between the Arab Spring protests and the Occupy movements of Fall 2011, at the onset of yet another hot Indian summer, an unusual drama appeared to be unfolding. In the wake of some of India’s most egregious corruption scandals, a civil society group, India Against Corruption (IAC), was apparently orchestrating a popular uprising against state corruption. IAC’s immediate demands focused on the passage of a strong Jan Lokpal (People’s Ombudsman) Bill by the Indian Parliament. Their initiative was not by itself new: the Lokpal bill had been intro- duced, but never passed, a total of eight prior times since 1968. This time, however, the movement seemed to gather a different momentum, thanks in large measure to its iconic ambassador: one Kisan Baburao Hazare—popularly known as Anna (father-figure, in Marathi) Hazare, a 75-year-old one-time soldier and long-time rural development activist, relatively unknown outside his native state of Maharashtra until he was decorated in 1992 with the Padmashree, a high civilian honor conferred for his work in rural development. Hazare was quickly dubbed a ‘‘modern Gandhi’’ for his commitment to grass- roots village development projects and to satyagraha: ethical-moral commitments articulated in non-violent protest. Perhaps the most powerful tool in his repertoire was the fast, which Hazare had used a few times in prior decades to press state action against corrupt officials, weak legislation, or bureaucratic sluggishness in enacting anti-corruption laws. The fasts of summer 2011, pushing for the drafting and then passing of a strong Jan Lokpal Bill whose reach extended all the way to the Prime Minister’s office, were much in the same mold, and appeared to place Hazare and his movement squarely within a Gandhian lineage. Curiously, however, it appeared not to be villagers or farmers but the ‘‘new middle class’’ who, by all reports, were responding en masse to Hazare’s call for accountability in governance. The centers of protest were largely urban; they seemed most to engage that ‘‘social group which is able to negotiate India’s new relationship with the global economy ...in cultural terms by defining a new cultural standard that rests on the socio-symbolic practices of commodity consumption and in economic terms as the beneficiaries of the material benefits of jobs in India’s ‘new[ly liberalized] economy’’’ (Fernandes, 2000: 91). Several commentators remarked on the absence of ‘‘rioting, stone-throwing, brick-batting, arson, pro- longed public bandhs [general strikes] and damage to property that are the norm for political protests in India’’ (Ganguly, 2011; Menon and Nigam, 2011). The fact that the protests were all remarkably peaceful—no buses burned, no stones thrown, and no police lathi charges necessary—was attributed to the social position of the protesters, who had up until now been presumed to be politically apathetic, but certainly not prone to street violence. News reports honed in quickly on the fact of middle-class participation, particularly that of younger urbanites comprised signifi- cantly of ‘‘professionals, white-collar workers, housewives and college students,’’ given the widespread use of new media during these protests: #isupportannahazare was a top trending topic, Facebook fan pages, Twitter handles, and YouTube Downloaded from joc.sagepub.com by guest on August 26, 2015 Khandekar and Reddy 223 videos proliferated, and protesters were registering their support via ‘‘missed calls’’ in the hundreds of thousands (Ganguly, 2011). The presence of the middle classes established, statistics were marshaled to drive home the significance of their participation: ‘‘India’s middle class will swell to 267 million people by 2016, from 160 million today, and will account for almost 40 percent of the country’s population after 15 years, according to a report by the National Council for Applied Economic Research,’’ reported Reuters India, under- scoring the potential impact of anti-corruption agitations by so large a group (de Bendern, 2011). ‘‘Urban India accounts for one third of the population now,’’ Jagannathan (2011) added, making the point that the participation of this group not only disavows sectarian politics, but also ensures in this that ‘‘change is around the corner.’’ The sheer order and scale of the movement, extrapolated exponentially by its projected impact, thus generated nothing short of a spectacle: the sense, if not the reality, of a united India against corruption. Of course, knowledge of and discontent over corruption is commonplace in India, and hardly limited to the middle classes, so the fact that it was this group that seemed most invested in the fate of the Lokpal debate requires some attention. The Indian middle class is of course not only staggeringly heterogeneous—‘‘by any reckoning the most polymorphous middle class in the world’’ (Beteille, 2001)—but also notoriously difficult to characterize numerically (Beteille, 2003; Sridharan, 2004; Vanaik, 2002). A few reports stressed this heterogeneity, pushing the bound- aries of what the ‘‘middle class’’ label might mean when applied to protester crowds (cf. Menon and Nigam, 2011); an essay by Sitapati (2011) in Economic and Political Weekly parsed the intellectual strands gathered as ‘‘middle class;’’ and an NDTV (2011) discussion honed in on what it might mean to call the protests a middle-class awakening. Such occasional reflections notwithstanding, the label largely stuck in the national media reportage that dominated coverage of the Lokpal movement—leaving us with the question of how to comprehend the seemingly impres- sionistic application of the ‘‘middle class’’ descriptor. The label, we contend, is an abstraction that necessarily interprets that which it describes, and is thus not to be disassociated from the other images, perspectives, and products collected under the Lokpal sign. It is endorsed very largely by a national media whose terrific expan- sion in the recent decade has transformed the very nature of the Indian ‘‘public’’ through its investment in the ‘‘global Indian’’ brand, bringing it into much tighter alignment with neoliberal market logics, and arched against the development- oriented welfare state (Chaudhuri, 2010). The ‘‘middle class’’ label thus marks out a heavily mediated terrain in which politics, activism, entertainment, and consumption can meld, commensurately widening the frameworks in which political action can be constituted and legitimized (McLagan, 2002: 99). It coalesces as much in protest venues as in national news reports—whose piecemeal minute- by-minute live reportage, Barber (2009) notes, provides a context in which to test emergent narratives, even while generating a fragile record of their coming into being (cf. Copeman and Reddy, 2012). We therefore hold the idea of the ‘‘new Indian middle class’’ less as a sociologically accurate descriptor and more Downloaded from joc.sagepub.com by guest on August 26, 2015 224 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(2) as a ‘‘marker of identification, aspiration, and critique in contemporary Indian public

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