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 cor- ruption 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]

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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

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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 move- ment—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 con- sumption 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

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as a ‘‘marker of identification, aspiration, and critique in contemporary Indian public culture,’’ a demarcation of a discursive-performative space whose practices constitute both class and its emergent politics (Fernandes, 2006: 176–205; Liechty, 2005: 3; Mazzarella, 2005: 3). Our analysis thus neither takes for granted nor seeks to dispel myths about protester demographics (for which there remains no precise data available), but asks: what shared imagination of corruption and political dysfunction, and what political ends are projected in the Lokpal protests? In his seminal essay on the state and corruption, Gupta (1995) rejects a reading of corruption as merely dysfunc- tion, regarding it instead as a mechanism by which the state is discursively con- stituted. Ours is a variant of his approach: precisely because corruption is held up as a marker of extreme political dysfunction, we see it as a mechanism by which an emergent middle-class politics discursively constitutes and legitimizes itself. What, then, are the class practices gathered under the ‘‘middle class’’ rubric, and how do these constitute the unusual politics of summer 2011? Recent scholarship in the anthropology of class generally hones in on the middle class’ situation betwixt and between transcendence and embodiment, globalization and localization, capital and labor, elite and common (Liechty, 2002; Vedwan, 2007). Its unstable position, Liechty adds, reflects the middle class’ own ‘‘ambigu- ous relationship to the productive economy’’: neither ‘‘sellers of labor (workers) [n]or owners of capital (the capitalist elite),’’ but ‘‘consumers of goods in the market place’’ (2002: 18, 16). While Liechty and others are primarily concerned with ‘‘day- by-day’’ performances of ordinary middle classness (2002: 34), the summer’s events were anything but commonplace. Indeed, it is an impending sense of impassable crisis, and the unthinkable scale and audacious recurrence of corruption scandals coming to light in the year leading up to 2011 that ultimately precipitated middle- class coherence, if not full blown class consciousness, around the Lokpal Bill issue. At the same time, routine habits, expectations, and ideologies of middle-class con- sumption permeate the Lokpal protests’ call for a fundamental transformation: the re-making of social relations in the image of products, and of ‘‘India’’ itself into a trustable brand personified by Anna Hazare (Vedwan, 2007). Drawing on Chatterjee’s (2004) distinction between political and civil society, Lukose (2005: 513) distinguishes between the political public constituted by the ‘‘‘right to protest’ as a measure of popular expression and legitimacy,’’ holding violence and agitation as justifiable, the heart of politics itself—and the (liberal, middle class) civic public fearful of violence, expecting politics to manage public disorder, respect property, and facilitate orderly consumption according to market norms and rules (2005: 513). By linking the ‘‘freedom of consumption’’ with the ‘‘freedom to move in an uninhibited way through public places,’’ Lukose argues, the public citizen articulates with the private consumer (513). In the case of the Lokpal agitation, too, movement is both physical and ideational. While the gov- ernment’s arrest of Hazare (and several hundreds of his supporters in other Indian cities; a move which gave the movement unprecedented momentum) was explicitly a move to prevent him from physically occupying a space of dissent and

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demonstration, what was at stake in the Lokpal agitation was as much the idea of smooth, rational bureaucratic movement, set starkly against the alternatingly disruptive, unruly, ineffective, inefficient, and wholly corrupt ‘‘recalcitrant social reality’’ (Vedwan, 2007: 663) that is the Indian state. For proponents of the Lokpal Bill, therefore, the contest Lukose identifies was a no-brainer: political publics had to be displaced by their civic counterparts, and the Bill represented a straightforward, efficient means to this singular end. Having thus identified both ailment and antidote, the only task remaining was for private con- sumers to occupy politics-as-usual. For the Lokpal movement did not merely hold up mass politics as an exemplar of corruption (Lukose, 2009: 134), it asserted the right of the civic to set the terms of the political, exceeding the form of traditional protest that Chatterjee (2011) and Lukose (2005, 2009) categorize as ‘‘anti- politics.’’ Instead, the movement deployed identifiable forms derived from anti- colonial nationalism (satyagraha, the fast) to displace all other political alternatives put forth, collapsing regional concerns into an overarching national anti-corrup- tion stance premised on the freedom to consume and the promise of a reliable national brand. Now, while consumption is not the exclusive domain of the middle class, laying claim to politics as itself a means of consumption—of public space, of state resources, of governance itself—is (Harriss, 2006, 2007; Webb, 2012). It is in this that we argue the Lokpal protests exemplify class practice by indexing ‘‘how discourses of consumption work to reconfigure [the very terms of] politics, citizenship, and democracy’’ in contemporary India (Liechty, 2002: 34; Lukose, 2005: 507). The remainder of this paper has three parts. The first sketches out historical context for the emergence of the new middle class and the political expressions we see in the Lokpal protests. The second considers the emergence of ‘‘Anna’’ as branded product through a series of successive ‘‘(re)qualifications’’ or stages of acquiring meaning, in the course of its production, distribution, and consumption (Callon et al., 2002). If ‘‘Brand Anna’’ stabilizes emotional meanings in a way that enables a powerful identification with IAC’s anti-corruption cause, we argue in the third and concluding section that it does so by absolving the middle class of com- plicity, externalizing ‘‘corruption’’ onto the ‘‘political classes’’ and ethics into law (Miller, 2001)—and by producing a complex identification with the state that is mediated by consumer sensibilities. We reflect in closing on the implications of branding Anna for the articulation of a middle-class politics in the idiom of consumption.

India’s ‘‘new middle class’’ To set the stage for the emergence of ‘‘Anna,’’ we offer a cursory history of the rise of India’s ‘‘new middle class’’ to highlight this group’s growing antagonism to the Indian state, and its consequent investment in privatization as a tool of socio- economic progress, addressing state failures, and indeed, circumventing the state. Fernandes (2006: 3–10) traces the origins of the ‘‘new middle class’’ to colonial

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educational policy, which generated a cultivated class of clerks and low-level bur- eaucrats who would rise to lead India’s nationalist movement. The new middle class’ identification with the nation-state was at first buttressed under Nehruvian state-led development that conferred these envisioned architects of modern, social- ist, independent India with managerial and technocratic responsibilities. Sustained investment in the infrastructure of higher education (over primary and secondary education) and a massive expansion of public sector services and industries under a developmentalist model continued to preferentially consolidate the social bases of the middle class (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987). Two factors abruptly blocked the new middle class’ rise, precipitating a general- ized sense of disenchantment with Nehruvian state-led development. The first was economic stagnation, beginning in the 1960s, which caused the ranks of ‘‘educated unemployed’’ to swell dramatically, and lead to a wave of professional emigration that would become India’s ‘‘brain drain’’ (Khadria, 2007). Secondly, the state’s constitutional commitments to social uplift paved the way for subordinate and regional social groups to lay increasingly assertive claim to limited supplies of state-managed resources. Such shifts brought the crisis of the developmental state to a head in the 1970s. Student strikes and mass protests were rocking the states of Gujarat and Bihar. A Janata Morcha (People’s Front) emerged in protest of government corruption and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s purported ineptitude. The Allahabad High Court found Mrs. Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice during her prior Lok Sabha campaign. Rather than resign, Mrs. Gandhi persuaded then President Ahmed to declare a state of constitutional emergency. Her pretext for suspending constitutional rights and civil liberties, strongly censoring the press, and stemming dissent by imprisoning oppositional political figures: economic slowdown was a ‘‘threat to national security.’’ Such perceived threats rationalized some of the per- iod’s worst excesses: forced sterilizations and slum demolitions, for example, that imposed middle-class notions of civic order onto the national body-politic. Writes Rajagopal, ‘‘[i]t contributed, ultimately, to the formation of a middle class that regarded such violence as legitimate, as law-making and law-preserving, enacted on its behalf, and on behalf of the nation as it ought to be’’ (2011: 1018). The legacy of the emergency is thus twofold: producing a strong investment in the judiciary and law as the means to check the excesses of the state (Sitapati, 2011), and, with considerable aid from the national media in later decades, projecting private middle-class values and expectations onto the public itself (Chaudhuri, 2010; Mankekar, 1999; Rajagopal, 2001). The place and role of labor in defining the nature of political contestation shifted, too: the state becoming generally unwilling to ‘‘entertain labour as a mean- ingful interlocutor in industrial relations and in economic development’’ and labor itself beginning to trade rights for cash benefits (Rajagopal, 2011: 1040–1041). Communal contestations, on the other hand, increased post-emergency, signaling the importance of ‘‘religious identity as the new salient category where consent was increasingly sought and contested’’ (1043). The very terms of national discourse

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shifted thus from a Nehruvian emphasis on ‘‘the economy as the crucial arena of nation-building, involving labour as a key modality of citizenship,’’ to one in which ‘‘culture and community became the categories that gained political salience’’ (1005; Reddy, 2006; van der Veer, 1994). If the Indian middle class had formerly operated ‘‘under the hegemony of the state,’’ it now became ‘‘increasingly assertive, but disenchanted with erstwhile forms of politics,’’ emerging as ‘‘the humble hero of national development, but lacking in privilege and deserving of assistance’’ (Rajagopal, 2011: 1010–1011). Such processes intensified through the 1980s and 1990s, increasingly pitting the middle class against the Indian state. The 1990s liberalization of the Indian econ- omy did little to quell growing communal violence and the furor over expanded affirmative action programs, both of which fostered the belief that middle-class interests were not being served by the democratic polity (Jaffrelot, 2000). ‘‘The plebianization of the political field’’ that the ascendancy of such regional caste leaders as Laloo Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav represented further alienated the middle class from political culture, and prompted a questioning of the state’s legitimacy. Politics came to represent ‘‘an ‘immoral vocation’, a site of unprincipled pragmatism, corruption, nepotism and greed ...the profane antithesis to the sub- lime qualities of the cultural realm’’ (Hansen, 1999: 8, 56). The result was a strengthened affinity between the upper-caste Hindu middle class and Hindutva (political Hinduism), on the one hand, and on the other, a hugely popular turn to privatization as the only possible response to addressing the dysfunctions of state-managed political-economy (Mankekar, 1999; Rajagopal, 2001). Economic liberalization opened out ‘‘infinite aspirations ...and their attendant frustrations’’ (Mazzarella, 2005: 5), further complicating the middle-class relation- ship to the state. On the one hand was measurable, pride-worthy economic pro- gress: a gross domestic product (GDP) lifted out of the stagnancy that was once sardonically dubbed the ‘‘Hindu Growth Rate,’’ rapidly expanding urban centers, ascendant service sector industries (such as IT), a new entrepreneurial spirit, and a proliferation of consumer goods and imported brands associated with upward mobility—all of which euphorically anointed the middle class as globally cosmo- politan agents of social change. The middle class’ erstwhile faith in the security of public sector ‘‘government’’ jobs gave way easily to an aspiration for private sector employment, signaling the ‘‘the production of a normative civic culture based on notions of the rights of consumer-citizens rather than the rights of workers’’ (Fernandes, 2006: 189). ‘‘Indian consumers’’ were not just being produced, but were suddenly globally accessible and sought-after; private consumption displaced public production as the ‘‘principal labor’’ of late capitalism (Appadurai, 1996: 66– 85). Even further, advertisers and newscasters alike were beginning to project mass consumption as the only viable alternative to centralized state planning (Mazzarella, 2003); the national media was not only expanding and becoming more interactive, but also the consolidation of transnational capital was enabling its heavy investment in the Global India brand (Chaudhuri, 2010). The trade- marked phrases of government ad campaigns would later affirm this projection

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of middle-class aspirations onto the state: India was both ‘‘Incredible’’ and ‘‘Shining,’’ elevated to the coveted status of corporate ‘‘motherbrand’’ (Khandekar and Otsuki, 2011: 131–135; Mazzarella, 2003: 39). The ‘‘middle class’’ was fast becoming a cultural form constitutive of a reconfigured economic, and therefore political, order. On the other hand, perhaps precisely because liberalization promised liberation ‘‘from the shoddy goods churned out by the flabby domestic industries that for decades had enjoyed the protections of the ‘permit-license raj’’’ (Mazzarella, 2003: 37), there was an ever greater impatience with politics-as-usual. The defunct Nehruvian ‘‘patriot-producer’’ could become the outward-looking, cosmopolitan ‘‘citizen-consumer’’ (Deshpande, 1993) only insofar as s/he could negotiate poor infrastructure, daily instability, often exacting and unpredictable tax regimes, and monumental government bureaucracy and corruption. Such underlying tensions were enacted and exaggerated in the Lokpal protests, to which we now turn.

‘‘I am Anna’’ The massive, unprecedented corruption scandals coming to light in the year leading up to 2011 (Figure 1) provided a crucial backdrop to the summer’s events. Each scam appeared more brazen than the last, involving wide collusions of political, bureaucratic, and business interests, and outrageous siphoning of public money. The violations were at once beyond dispute and incomprehensibly egregious: ‘‘It’s a quantitative thing,’’ Appadurai (2012) explains: ‘‘the number of zeros attached to

2G: In which technology Minister A Raja is alleged to have sold 2G electromagnetic spectrum licenses at rates determined seven years prior to select firms in exchange for kickbacks. Scam enacted 2008; widely publicized investigations lead to arrests in 2011. Losses to the exchequer amount to Rs 176, 645 crores (US$35.2 billion). Lost revenues are an additional Rs 31 crore (US$6 million) as of April 2011, when the Central Bureau of Investigation files an 80,000 page chargesheet, naming 9 individuals including Raja, and 3 corporate houses. 3G “Spectrum” Scam: In which private and state-owned telecom operators bid for 3G licenses, but commenced private bidding among themselves to expand their service areas in violation of the terms of licensure. Losses to the exchequer rolled into the amount quoted for the 2G scam. Commonwealth Games (CWG) Scam: In which organizing officials are charged with incompetence, procedural irregularities with bidding and contracts, inflating prices, and outright bribes. The 2010 Games were budgeted at US$270 million, went over to US$4.1 billion, with revenues amounting only to US$38 million. Adarsh Housing Society Scam: In which key politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers appropriate prime government property in South Mumbai, building and allocating flats in violation of Environment Ministry rules. Scam enacted over 10 years. Total value unknown.

Figure 1. ‘‘Scam after Scam. Lie after Lie.’’1

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corruption sums is now so large that it’s no longer absorbable in popular imagination ...[T]he runaway nature of big deals and auctioning off of government resources to private people is so big that people can no longer accept them as part of their reality.’’ The group that channeled this nascent incomprehension into outright resent- ment was Team Anna, as the core group comprising IAC came to be known. Team Anna had five members besides Hazare: Arvind Kejriwal, a one-time Indian Revenue Services employee turned activist; Manish Sisodia, Kejriwal’s assistant; Kiran Bedi, the first woman to join the Indian Police Services and a bureaucrat with a reputation for no-nonsense efficiency and incorruptibility; Shanti Bhushan, a one-time Law Minister and now judicial reform activist; and Prashant Bhushan, his son. Bedi, Kejriwal, and Sisodia, all linked through earlier work on ‘‘Right To Information’’ campaigns, apparently set their sights on the Lokpal cause in the aftermath of the 2 G spectrum scam. It was only then that Kejriwal recruited Hazare as the public face of the campaign precisely because of his reputation for personal incorruptibility, Gandhian austerity, and unquestionable moral rectitude. Thus, while IAC’s interest in Lokpal formed earlier, Hazare was conscripted as something of an ‘‘afterthought’’ (Kirpal, 2011). How was it that Hazare—a professed Gandhian whose old-school values and sometimes regressive methods were ostensibly antithetical to the political sensibil- ities of his middle-class supporters (cf. Verma, 1998)—became the undisputed fig- urehead of the anti-corruption cause? The answer lies as much in Team Anna’s carefully crafted strategy as in the coincidental, spontaneous, and ultimately emo- tive public identifications that IAC’s anti-corruption stance generated. Taking an analytical clue from news media analysis of the time, which were quick to identify ‘‘Brand Anna’’ and the consumerist sensibility of the summer’s agitations (Chaudhary, 2011), we consider IAC’s anti-corruption message as a product qua- lified and re-qualified by different agents through the processes of design, produc- tion, distribution, and consumption (Callon et al., 2002: 198). Product meanings are inherently unstable, and yet ‘‘all qualification aims to establish a constellation of characteristics, stabilized at least for a while, which are attached to the product and transform it temporarily into a tradable good in the market’’ (199). Our con- cern in this section is with establishing the meanings and (good) values that Brand Anna consolidated and stabilized effectively enough that the case was soon being analyzed in the national media and MBA classrooms alike (Gangal, 2011; Shankar, 2011). The movement’s most prominent chant, ‘‘I am Anna,’’ allows us to map the ‘‘constellation of characteristics’’ that differentiate and stabilize IAC’s anti-corrup- tion message. The value of the Anna brand, we contend, is established via three key moves: introspection, affective-ethical identification, and nostalgia. The result, as we will argue in the following section, is the emergence of a spectacular middle- class politics driven by the idiom of consumption. IAC’s carefully calibrated publicity campaign showcased Hazare’s impeccable credentials of moral and personal incorruptibility, in large part by ensuring uninterrupted 24/7 access to ‘‘Anna.’’ Honest, committed, courageous,

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transparent, and driven by the force of truth and conviction, Anna promised to be everything government bureaucracy, and particularly the present Congress govern- ment (Gupta, 2011), was not. IAC chose its allies carefully, distancing itself quickly from figures like Baba Ramdev, a yoga guru with a significant following, whose religiosity and theatrical rhetoric stood in for politics-as-usual and threatened to erode IAC’s credibility: sectarianism was not to be the idiom of protest this time around (Menon and Nigam, 2011). Several satellite websites for individual city- specific IAC chapters, as well as a centralized campaign branding website (iacbran- ding.org), soon went live. Member pages on Facebook and Google+, and a sus- tained use of tweets and SMS communique´s provided continual updates on Anna’s health, his fasts, and his position on on-going debates. With advice from industry experts, information was carefully released at strategic times: never in conflict with sports reporting or other popular entertainment broadcasts, with equal attention paid to the vernacular (Hindi-speaking) media, and with ‘‘Breaking News’’ head- lines supplied with appropriate frequency (Kanwal, 2011). Campaign merchandise included badges, T-shirts, arm bands, stickers, Gandhi topis [hats], and other wear- ables, each bearing ‘‘I am Anna’’ insignia, translated into several regional lan- guages. Other promotional material (brochures, hoardings, posters, etc.) pictured professionals and workers alike as supporters of what had now become Anna’s (Jan) Lokpal Bill. The Congress government in power unwittingly fanned Team Anna’s fire by arbitrarily arresting Hazare before he could commence an indefinite fast on August 16, at Jai Prakash Narayan Park in New Delhi. The government’s decision proved hugely unpopular, even earned them the title kala angrez or Black Englishmen, but Team Anna capitalized just as hugely on this turn of events. For one, they ensured that protesters had access to Hazare while he was imprisoned: Bedi’s clips of Hazare addressing the largely young Lokpal protesters who appeared to be rallying behind him were widely circulated on YouTube (thekiranbedi2011, 2011) and vir- tually all television networks. Next, in a classic throwback to Gandhian techniques, Hazare refused to leave the prison and continued fasting there until the state granted him the permission to carry out his fast in public. The move was keenly strategic: on the very same date in 1933, Gandhi had begun a fast from jail to protest the insufficiency of resources to continue his work with the socially disad- vantaged groups known then as Harijans. Eventually, Hazare secured the necessary authorizations for carrying out a 21-day fast at Ramlila Maidan [grounds], where he appeared alongside his team and many a Bollywood celebrity lending support to his cause. Through such publicity, Team Anna very successfully marshaled the attentions of the mass media to generate incessant reportage: as one news headline during this time put it, ‘‘Love him or hate him: Anna IS the newspaper this morn- ing’’ (Srivastava, 2011). As the summer wore on, protestors donning ‘‘I am Anna’’ merchandise became as prominent in online and broadcast imageries as Anna himself. Demonstrators with their ‘‘I am Anna’’ insignia packed into protest venues across the country: some fasting in solidarity with Hazare, others singing patriotic songs and waving

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the national flag, many wearing Anna topis or helping to feed protesters, many offering their own localized comment on corruption via a unique set of garments, grievances or complaints, such as the proliferation of godmen, children who could not get jobs for refusing to pay bribes, corruption in property deals, and more (Joshi et al., 2011). News reportage snapshots regularly conveyed a diverse set of concerns: from personal experiences of the barriers enforced by corruption, to more generalized complaints about the failures of state-driven development. Thus were a wide range of local narratives and imageries—from Punjabi basanti (yellow/saffron)-colored turbans invoking the sacrifice of Bhagat Singh, the anti- colonial revolutionary hanged by the British, to ‘‘pink lady’’ attire invoking the Uttar Pradeshi vigilante Gulab Gang’s abrasive, anti-corruption, pro-women activ- ism (Joshi et al., 2011)—subsumed, and considerably subdued, under the sign of Lokpal. Demonstrators not only defined the terms of their participation, but will- ingly articulated their particular local/regional critiques and approaches with the overarching logic of the Lokpal movement. In this convergence, as we shall show, protesters express commitment to the Anna brand, which is at once intimate, inspiring, culturally entrenched, and yet fully capable of ‘‘flexing its muscles on the battlefields of the global market,’’ the very icon of bourgeois consumer citizen- ship (Mazzarella, 2003: 55). As a protest chant, the message of ‘‘I am Anna’’ was simple: each one of the protesters could, in principle, be a Hazare him/herself, a common citizen risking arbitrary arrest by an idiosyncratic and bureaucratic government for an ethically inviolable cause. Indexing the intensification of the protests, the ‘‘I am Anna’’ identification transposed the ‘‘Anna’’ persona onto each individual body of the thousands gathered: individual, local grievances subsumed under hundreds of indi- vidual impersonations manufactured a collective solidarity. As Prathap Suthan, the branding executive behind the ‘‘India Shining’’ and ‘‘Incredible India’’ campaigns averred, ‘‘What makes Hazare special is that he is a simple, honest, old, frail man who has nothing except public support. He is fire, light, hope, and he is me ...This is David versus Goliath. Part II.’’ (quoted in Soofi, 2011; italics added). Initial identification established, the chant then prompted critical introspection. ‘‘Why are you Anna?’’ was one oft-asked question (Bhasin, 2011). The intimacy of the ‘‘I am Anna’’ impersonation forced the existential question: ‘‘Am I really Anna?’’ Pondering ‘‘corruption,’’ its reach and limits, where ‘‘corruption’’ ceased and became routine transaction, now all the more demanded ethical reflection. The figure of Hazare, clad in rustic white Gandhian garb represented a moral gold standard for the movement. The ‘‘I am Anna’’ chant seemed paradoxically to remind protesters that they were not (yet) Anna, but impersonators needing to reflect closely on their individual ethical-moral comportments in order to claim such lofty identification. The result was a confessional mode of introspection reflected in questions such as: ‘‘Have you ever given a bribe?’’ (Tejaswi, 2011) and, if yes, then: ‘‘Could one really be a supporter of Hazare?’’ (Dasrathi, 2011). Others, most prominent among them writer Arundhati Roy (2011a), rejected the standard entirely in the counter-assertion ‘‘I’d rather not be Anna,’’ as part of her

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larger critique of the blinkered, middle-class orientation of the Lokpal movement. One way or another, the ‘‘I am Anna’’ prompt precipitated both groundswell and pause to consider whether one was, or could be, or wished to be Anna at all. As the ‘‘new clarion call against corruption [in India]’’ (Venkatramakrishnan and Munshi, 2011), ‘‘I am Anna’’ was not merely reflexive, but a spontaneous solidarity-building move that at first appeared peculiar. It was distinctly unlike other protest movement slogans, such as the Arabic ‘‘silmiyya’’ [safety, peace] from the Tahrir Square gatherings of the ‘‘Arab Spring’’ (Butler, 2011), and the Farsi ‘‘ma bishomarim’’ [‘‘we are many’’] and ‘‘resaneh shomaid’’ [‘‘you are the messenger, you are the media’’] of the 2009 Iranian Green Wave protests (Fischer, 2010)—both of which drew on locally meaningful rhetorical repertoires to articu- late demands for social change. ‘‘I am Anna’’ was also unlike classic Indian protest chants like Vande Mataram [Salutations to the Motherland] and Inquilaab Zindabaad [Long Live the Revolution], with cultural roots in anti-colonial struggle. So deep was the faith in India’s newly acquired global cosmopolitanism, it is no wonder that the Lokpal movement took inspiration from another major site of its articulation with globalization: the ‘‘dream worlds of mass consumerism’’ (Fernandes, 2006; Mazzarella, 2005: 13). To elaborate: ‘‘I am Anna’’ seamlessly utilizes the now-ubiquitous rhetorics and strategies of emotional/ affective brand- ing (Arvidsson, 2005; Gobe´, 2001) from campaigns such as Nike’s 1997 ‘‘I am Tiger Woods’’ (advocating colorblindness in sports) and ‘‘Here I am’’ (to inspire young women to get involved in sports). Tellingly, these commercial campaigns each had a social message at their core: brand loyalty was generated via identification with a progressive multicultural and gender politics. The ‘‘I am’’ expressions of brand loyalty intensified in recent movements for ethics and social justice, each one tell- ingly facilitated by social media, each one emotively charged with ethical indigna- tion at public excesses and egregious transgressions, each one an against-the-odds ‘‘David versus Goliath’’ encounter, and each one therefore gathering disparate individual positions into a collective political solidarity: the 2010 ‘‘I am Spartacus’’ Twitter protests in the UK, ‘‘We are the 99%’’ of the Occupy protests, the 2012 ‘‘I am Trayvon Martin’’ spontaneous identification with a slain Florida teenager, and Mexico’s 2012 Yo Soy 132/I am 132 student protests. ‘‘I am Anna’’’s efficacy draws from its own tacit alignment with these other global protest move- ments whose rhetoric, logic of affective-ethical identification, and methods it rep- licates to add immeasurable value to Brand Anna. As Mazzarella (2003: 34) notes, ‘‘aspirational consumerism’’ speaks a universal- ist language that promises ‘‘world class’’ goods for mass consumption—in the same breath as it insists on cultural specificity, exclusivity, and social distinction. Thus, when ‘‘I am Anna’’ did turn to its local roots, it did so romantically, evoking a specific anti-colonial nationalist nostalgia that was the most visually and concep- tually complex qualification of its meaning. The figure of Hazare, his use of sat- yagraha, the widespread sales of his Gandhian topi, and the omnipresence of the Mahatma-image backdrop, enlarged and dramatically visible from a distance even when Hazare physically was not, invoked the nationalist movement and struggle

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against colonialism consistently and dramatically on stage. The wide mass- mediated circulation of ‘‘I am Anna’’ imagery then further re-qualified and entrenched these historical associations. For example, the network TV channel UTV Bindass’ ‘‘I am Anna’’ anthem positioned Hazare’s iconic Gandhianism dir- ectly in the lineage of anti-colonial struggle (Bindass, 2011). Written and performed by a rap artist calling himself Microphon3, the video features young protagonists rallying for the Lokpal cause, each donning a Gandhi topi. It divides Indian history into three distinct epochs, each with its own definitive character: ‘‘Dadagiri. Gandhigiri. Aur ab, Annagiri’’ [First, the way of bullies/colonists. Then, the way of Gandhi. And now, the way of Anna]. Opening images, featuring a man wearing a T-shirt with the emblazoned text ‘‘Be a Part of the Second Freedom Struggle,’’ make explicit the association of the Lokpal movement with anti-colonial nation- alism, India’s first freedom struggle. The minute-and-half video then projects clips from the on-going round of Lokpal-related agitations, screen captures of news- paper reports, and several shots of the Indian flag against a bare wall. Literally in the light of these projections are young protesters and the rapper himself, whose voices independently and then collectively build into an ‘‘I am Anna’’ chorus. The video strategically intersperses nostalgia-inducing black-and-white frames with col- ored ones throughout, collapsing past and present. The anthem exhorts its audi- ence to firm their resolves in the fight against corruption: it is because each one of them is a Hazare, the video urges, that all should tirelessly defend the honor of their mother, Hindustaan [India]. In short, the anthem appears as a call to arms for India’s youth to play their part in the on-going war against corruption, which is here fashioned explicitly as modern heir to an older, venerable, and equally inviol- able opposition to colonial excesses and injustices. The visual strategies of the UTV Bindass anthem recall those deployed in the hugely popular 2006 Bollywood film, Rang de Basanti.2 Here, too, re-enacted epi- sodes of the historical struggle against colonialism are presented in sepia tones, interspersed and set against a full-color tale of indifferent urban middle-class col- lege youth awakening to a realization of history and the realities of state corrup- tion. Here, too, a globalized middle class seized of consumerist possibility articulate a critique of the postcolonial state (Lukose, 2009: 203). The film popularized the use of the anti-colonial metaphor to characterize contemporary anti-corruption struggles as a second freedom movement. Rang de Basanti, however, evokes a revolutionary nationalist ethic quite distinct from the soft Gandhianism indexed by ‘‘I am Anna’’: its title derives from a poem written by the nationalist revolu- tionary Ram Prashad Bismil; it is associated, in the 1965 film Shaheed (‘‘Martyr’’), with the life of Bhagat Singh who recites its lyrics before his execution by the British; it concludes in a guerilla-style take-over of the (government controlled) All India Radio studio microphone, quickly silenced by raining down bullets. If Rang de Basanti’s narration of ‘‘history as nostalgia’’ ‘‘repeat[s] history by reliving it,’’ a second 2006 film, Lage Raho Munnabhai ‘‘rework[s history] as a brand, making it comfortable, friendly and facile’’ (Visvanathan, 2006, 2011b). This comedy about a small-time crook who finds his ethical self after visits from

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Gandhi’s ghost turns the Mahatma into a cool, hip, patois-speaking ‘‘one of us’’ who nonetheless exemplifies Gandhigiri—a term the film coins and hugely popu- larizes (Joshi, 2006). Munnabhai thus rescues Gandhi from ‘‘archive, monument, and history’’ (Visvanathan, 2006) and re-engineers his relevance to contemporary urban middle-class culture: ‘‘the corporeality of his experiments with sex and food squeamishly ushered out of the drawing room of official memory,’’ Gandhi’s otherworldliness is rendered ‘‘smoothly compatible with the marketing imagination’’ (Mazzarella, 2010: 29, 2). The Mahatma becomes ‘‘an agony aunt’’: ‘‘practical, effective, gentle and professional [...] a pragmatic art of life man,’’ user friendly, and ‘‘consumable in between popcorn and chips, Nescafe and Maggi noodles, Dale Carnegie and Vincent Peale’’ (Visvanathan, 2006; cf. Ghosh and Babu, 2006). The UTV Bindass video exemplifies what has come to be known as the ‘‘Rang de Basanti effect’’: a politics deeply critical of the Indian state, its corruptions and inconsistencies, invested in belonging to a globally competitive nation, and enact- ing its protest ‘‘the millennium way’’: mobilizing online forums and social network- ing channels to muster broad-based support (Ghosh, 2006; Lukose, 2009).3 The video thus continues in contemporary real life where Rang de Basanti and Munnabhai leave off in imagination: not with revolution, but with an elaboration of ‘‘what I am’’—which is, not coincidentally, the sponsoring network’s own tag- line.4 And ‘‘what I am’’ in this instance is Anna: Gandhian, but not entirely revo- lutionary; bindass [cool], but not without ethical substance. The aesthetics of the video, along with its lyrics and narrative presentation thus position the Lokpal protests in a neo-Gandhian genealogy of struggle against colonial domination, and create a powerful sense of history-in-the-making, or ‘‘histoire noire,’’ (Appadurai, 1996: 77). The irony, of course, is that the generation of young Indians that Hazare seemed to be mobilizing had no actual memory of satyagraha, Gandhi, or even the Indian independence struggle. ‘‘I am Anna’’ and its constellation of associations had extremely successfully marshaled an ‘‘ersatz nostalgia—nostalgia without memory,’’ that taught the protesters to ‘‘miss things that they had never lost’’ (Appadurai, 1996: 82, 77). The ultimate value of Brand Anna was that it could return these lost things, in an accessible and eminently useable form, to a public convinced of its own moral rectitude and primed for consumption.

‘‘It’s the middle class, stupid!’’5 The brand opportunity that Hazare represented turns explicitly on the differenti- ation of the ‘‘Anna’’ product from existing government alternatives, the problem with which was collapsed into a single issue: corruption. This problem displaced other concerns such as poverty, which Nehruvian plans once sought to alleviate via state-driven development (Lukose, 2009: 203), on the logic that even poverty was at root a problem of redistribution, created in large measure by state corruption. Curiously, however, ‘‘corruption’’ remained simultaneously the most definite and indefinite issue at stake in the Lokpal debate: on the one hand, it was the matter

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that the many circulating versions of the Lokpal Bill sought to pin down and procedurally tackle; on the other, it was the variety and ubiquity of retail forms of corruption, sufficiently common and marked as the malaise of Indian modernity, that created a powerfully unifying but still generalized identification with the issue of the Bill in the first place. Yet, ironically enough, routine corruption could go only so far in animating the Lokpal debate, precisely because it was a routine middle-class phenomenon, the very mechanics of daily middle-class interactions with state bureaucracy (Chatterjee, 2011; Roy, 2011a; Sainath, 2011). Only when the siphoned amounts become egregious, and only when they were clearly identifiable with the ‘‘ruling class,’’ did it become both possible and imperative to question the status quo. Writes Mishra (2011):

[I]n the middle class space there’s no real distaste for corruption or hatred for the corrupt as such. Most of the graft in the country happens in this space. But there has to be an equilibrium. Imagine the reaction if the amount involved in the 2G scam was just Rs 20 lakh and not what many believe is Rs 1.76 lakh crore. Would the reaction against former Telecom Minister A. Raja have been as strong in that case? No. Because Rs 20 lakh corruption is acceptable. It continues the equilibrium, the other amount shakes it up badly.

The outrageous and unthinkable scale of these scandals thus produced a ‘‘moment of publicity’’: a point at which public tolerance for transgression ‘‘explode[s] spec- tacularly onto the public stage’’ (Gould, 2010 : 4). Even as this ‘explosion’ was stabilizing into Brand Anna, an increasingly clam- orous debate was equally making it clear that the Lokpal Bill could not alone contain the multiple conceptions of corruption in circulation: from a multitude of everyday retail forms, to ways in which ‘‘low wages ...constitute[d] a corrosive force in society,’’ or in which the ‘‘state govern[ed] its intransigent peoples’’ (Sengupta, 2011), to the excesses of caste and social injustice. These last, Dalit [formerly untouchable] groups claimed, were much more a systemic problem than spectacular bureaucratic corruption (Ambrose Pinto, 2011; Ghildiyal, 2011). Writers on the Left generally conceded that corruption had become an ‘‘empty signifier’’ to which multiple, contradictory meanings could be imputed. The Lokpal Bill, they claimed, could never wholly address these without compro- mising core democratic principles (Ansari, 2011; Nigam, 2011; Sengupta 2011). It bears mentioning that the independent Left was really the only ‘‘middle class’’ group to express clear reservations about the Lokpal Bill. Breaking down the ‘‘middle class’’ monolith, Sitapati (2011: 40) offers a typology of middle-class activ- ist strands based on their historical emergence, preferred tools, and ideological situation: neo-Gandhians, legal activists, the ‘‘India Shining’’ brand-loving corpor- ate middle class, and the independent Left. The first three groups congeal in their support of Anna Hazare, bringing complementary approaches and skill-sets to the table and therefore coming into an alignment that can re-articulate the political,

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rather than merely an anti-politics. The Independent Left, by contrast, espoused a more ambivalent stance towards the on-going Lokpal agitation. Almost universally, those on the Left harbored reservations about Team Anna’s demands, the efficacy of the Bill as a solution to corruption, the populism of the moment, and the ‘‘market friendly, Global Indian’’ (Giri, 2011) middle-class constituencies that the Lokpal was apparently mobilizing. For some, the movement smelled rightist (Giri, 2011): one reason to maintain a critical distance, although this character was by all accounts hard to pin down. To others, however, the very popularity of the movement was proof of the flawed moral absolutism of the Left: Menon (2011) wonders, for exam- ple, ‘‘how do we on ‘the Left’ manage so unerringly to be exactly where ‘the people’ are not, time after time?’’ (see also: Krishnan, 2011). Clearly, the Lokpal movement had prompted the Independent Left to articulate its own commitments, politics, and relevance in/to contemporary Indian society—particularly given the uneven successes and contradictory positions of the political Left. However, that these discussions were happening on platforms such as Kafila, a critical media studies blog, quite apart from protest sites and national news reportage, and that they did not cohere into a single, simple message of the ‘‘I am Anna’’ sort, implied that Left critiques were never the sort of ‘‘overflowings’’ that required interven- tion. Left discussions were academically oriented, and either critical of or ideo- logically distanced from the logics of consumption that were driving the protests. They could thus easily be dismissed as elite and out of touch, their reconfigur- ations of the relationships between politics, democracy, and citizenship effectively deemed less than relevant. Author-columnist Chetan Bhagat (2011), for example, expressed shock and disappointment with the intense criticism leveled at Hazare by ‘‘sections of the English-speaking Indian intellectual classes,’’ attributing it to a bias against Hazare’s ‘‘background, rustic methods, or sudden rise to fame.’’ Others, like Jagannathan (2011), posited Team Anna’s successes as a prompt for ‘‘simply the pits’’ Left intellectuals to ‘‘get out of [their] ivory towers,’’ acknow- ledge their disdain for others sharing their class position, and meet ‘‘real people’’ unlike those with whom they routinely interacted with at ‘‘various seminar circuits.’’ In their eagerness to recover the progressive possibilities of Left politics, how- ever, these commentators fail to recognize that the empty space of signification marked out by the Lokpal take on ‘‘corruption’’ was the very locus of brand identity-formation: in which the ‘‘I am Anna’’ chant could rise to a crescendo, where ‘‘what I am’’ was being writ-large, and therefore in which a powerful middle-class politics was congealing. It was thus neither entirely empty nor free- floating, but structured first by consumerist aspirations, and second by what Chatterjee (2011) and Lukose (2009) have called an ‘‘anti-politics,’’ which we take to mean an othering of government bureaucracy, the state, and politics-as- usual, and finally by laying claim to politics itself. Fernandes (2006) demonstrates that the Indian middle class has historically been constituted by enacting a ‘‘politics of distinction,’’ whose practices of consumption simultaneously differentiate this amorphous and expanding group from the urban poor and working classes on the

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one hand, and the state on the other. As we are about to show, a similar differen- tiation produces the ‘‘middle class’’ of the Lokpal agitations and its apparently apolitical consumerist politics in two tidy moves: externalizing corruption on to the ‘‘political classes’’ and ethics into law. At the same time, such externalizations sanction the deeply held middle-class belief that their private values should be public values, liberal civic virtues should define political norms—instituting priva- tized class practices not only as a means of circumventing the state and electoral process (Fernandes, 2006), but laying claim to a re-imagined state bureaucracy. In this, we argue, a politics of distinction equally fosters a complex identification with a privatized (efficient, rational, accountable) version of the state. Indeed, the middle-class distinctions enacted during the Lokpal protests advance a logic of occupation that displaces political culture as Indians know it, in an en masse assertion of the ‘‘freedom [turned right] to consume’’ (Lukose, 2005). The first consequence of the corruption scams coming to light, particularly the 2 G affair, was an almost knee-jerk homogenization and cordoning off of the ruling class of politicians as an inherently corrupt lot. On this register, the scandals simply confirmed long-held middle-class beliefs about politicians being an inherently greedy, vulgar, unscrupulous lot, for whom corrupt politics represents but a path to power and personal gain (Jagannathan, 2011). Recent studies confirm that cor- ruption does in fact constitute a terrain in which socially disenfranchised groups negotiate the terms of their empowerment and thereby also their relationships with the state, sometimes indeed for quotidian and uncommon political gain (Anjaria, 2011; Witsoe, 2011). Such discourses of empowerment, however, are invariably eclipsed by claims to entitlement (Gupta, 1995), which the middle class is now keen to extract, having ‘‘sacrificed its narrowly defined class interest on behalf of the nation in earlier decades’’ (Mazzarella, 2005: 7). Jeffrey (2002) notes, too, that elite groups can be as invested in corruption for the maintenance of routine busi- ness and social order as they are in circulating anti-corruption discourses. Their everyday corruptions are disguised and discrete, screened off by public protest- ations that project an entirely different ethics from that of daily functioning. The middle class that gathers under the Lokpal anti-corruption banner similarly screens its own complicities by separating aam aadmi, or the ‘‘common man’’ in whose company it places itself, from the governing class of politicians and bureaucrats. It conveniently ignores the fact that private businesses were also significant benefici- aries of the corruption scandals, on the oft-cited logic that private enterprise cannot progress but for such tactics. State flaws trump all else in this discourse; corruption is simplistically and instrumentally a ‘‘naked signifier of power’’ (Witsoe, 2011: 82). The distinction between ‘‘state’’ and ‘‘civil society’’ that Gupta (1995: 384, 376) argues is blurred in practice, being ‘‘descriptively inadequate’’ and ‘‘an imperialism of categories’’ is precisely what is being asserted, with moral authority vested in civil society. The ‘‘moment of publicity’’ thus transformed what had hitherto been a popular truism into a political tool of mass mobilization that Team Anna utilized to its distinct advantage. Routinely inflated perceptions of corrupt politicians were

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pushed into hyperbole, producing unexpected results. Lokpal thus became the cause du jour, compelling a group that typically went to ‘‘elaborate lengths to avoid engagement with ‘dirty’ politics’’ to court arrest and organize public protest (Vembu, 2011a), with the surprising effect that ‘‘a cranky, dogged old man [had] managed to get a famously apathetic cynical middle class off its collective butt’’ (Roy, 2011b). This initial, organic cohesion was steadied, as we have seen, in Brand Anna, but there were still ‘‘overflowings’’ which needed to be managed (Callon et al., 2002; cf. Foster, 2007: 719). Baba Ramdev’s religiosity, theatrical antics, and vociferous rhetorical demands for the return of ‘‘black money’’ was one instance that threa- tened destabilization, and therefore from which Team Anna distanced itself early on. Another was veteran actor Om Puri’s impassioned outburst from the stage at Ramlila Maidan, the site of one of the largest protests and most effective fasts: ‘‘Yeh anpadh hain ...Aadhe se zyaada MP ganwaar hain ...Yeh MPs kya karte hain? Paanch saal tak aish karte hain, lootate hain desh ko ...main jaanta hoon inko, inke gharon mein kya hai’’ (They are illiterate. More than half the MPs [Members of Parliament] are country bumpkins ...What do the MPs do? They enjoy the five years, loot the country. I know them, I know what they have in their homes) (Vembu, 2011b). Kiran Bedi’s animated demonstration on the Ramlila Maidan stage, in which she mocked Indian parliamentarians for their ‘‘double-faced utterances’’ was a third example: ‘‘[t]his is how they behave,’’ she gesticulated, pulling a scarf over her head, ‘‘one thing with a mask and another without a mask’’ (IANS, 2011). While these ‘‘atmospherics’’ were acceptable as genuine indications of mounting ‘‘frustration against corruption’’ (Vembu, 2011b), as indeed also against the fairly routine heckling, chair-throwing, disruptive political culture of Indian parliamen- tary debate, they also posed a threat. Team Anna’s campaign derived its authority from its impeccable credentials: peacefulness, orderliness, and incorruptibility, the manner in which ‘‘buttoned-down ...suburban bureaucrats’’ like Bedi and Kejriwal could ‘‘wave their competence like a flag, hammer home their profession- alism, matching brief for brief, bill for bill’’ (Visvanathan, 2011a). Against such a cultivated reputation, the reported emergence of drunken biker gangs assaulting people in the streets while brandishing the national flag and chanting ‘‘I am Anna,’’ the presence of notorious ‘‘criminal’’ elements among the protesting crowds, and the ‘‘uncivil’’ nature of Bedi’s and Puri’s rhetoric threatened to undermine the legitimacy of ‘‘Anna’s moral crusade’’ (Sardesai, 2011; Vembu, 2011b). If the pro- tests were not to devolve from ‘‘a genuine people’s movement into a lumpen expres- sion of mob fury’’ (Sardesai, 2011) they had to eschew such destabilizing ‘‘overflowings’’ and not become yet another example of it. Severed thus from everyday systemic forms, externalized onto the political other, while the ‘‘middle class’’ gained unprecedented ethical-moral coherence, ‘‘corruption’’ became a largely technical problem to be addressed via punitive action and legal/procedural means: an ombudsman’s office, a grievance procedure, a set of legal provisions, protections for whistle-blowers, a structure of redressal

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and oversight, a citizen’s charter, and no institutional gaps or loopholes. Thus do several critical commentators observe that the Lokpal movement simplistically narrowed corruption to the giving and taking of bribes and the gross misuse of public office. Writes Sengupta (2011), only ‘‘corruption of the ‘safest’ kind—easy to initiate, easy to end, easy to mask, easy to unmask and easy to be seduced by and easy to hate’’ was the Lokpal Bill’s target. Moreover, he asserts, the movement appeared incognizant of the deeply unequal nature of Indian society: its conception of ‘‘corruption’’ hardly differentiated between the squatter bribing the local muni- cipal official for housing allocation and the encroacher putting up a villa through similar means—a point variously buttressed by several other studies that illuminate the finely imbricated roles of bribery, patronage, brokerage, and political medi- ation in formulating, or indeed circumventing, everyday interactions with the Indian state (Anjaria, 2011; Harriss, 2005; Gould, 2010; Manor, 2000; Shah, 2009; Wade, 1982; Webb, 2012; Widmalm, 2005). Instead, critics aver, the move- ment created problematic moral equivalences, elided the complex burdens of ensur- ing democratic ethics, and merely reorganized (rather than dismantled) existing structural inequalities (Chatterjee, 2011; Roy, 2011a). The movement transposed ethical responsibility for professional and morally upright comportment onto the Lokpal and the judiciary. Our point is that the Lokpal movement enacts a politics of distinction in these twin externalizing moves—absolving the middle classes from their own responsi- bilities in fostering corruption and thinking in ‘‘dyadic terms’’ of ‘‘‘corrupter’ and ‘corrupted’’’ when it is more appropriate to attend ‘‘to how differently positioned agents [...] insert themselves into patron-client networks’’ (Jeffrey, 2002: 48). Yet, the faith that the Lokpal movement places in the Bill as a solution to the malaise that is corruption suggests that distinction is really only half the story; middle-class politics is equally about enacting a complex identification with the state. Parry (2000) holds that what we today call ‘‘corruption’’ was, in customary Mughal practice, a legitimate system of disbursing state revenues as salaries. It took not only the emergence of the nation-state, but equally the permeation of the state into daily interactions, and the acceptance of the state as the guardian of public interests to regard private appropriations of public resources as ‘‘corrup- tion’’ at all. Corruption rankles not just because its instances have increased, then, but because it ‘‘subverts a set of values to which people are increasingly com- mitted’’ (53). The Lokpal case, too, exemplifies the middle class’ internalization of universal- istic bureaucratic norms and impersonal procedures, as well as faith in the rational authority of public office, in and through which the public wrong that is corruption can be technically righted. Its reliance on law as a tool of political cleansing points to a fundamental identification with the values that the impersonal, rational state should properly uphold—values safeguarded variously in each proposed version of the Lokpal Bill. The massive public protests and the immense popularity of Brand Anna in mobilizing support for Lokpal then qualify this identification: they call additionally for speed in bureaucracy, ‘‘quality, delivery, dignity, and the right of

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recall’’ (Visvanathan, 2011b), and for India to become a corporate motherbrand has trusted as Hazare himself. In this, the Lokpal movement transposes standards of consumer accountability onto the state itself. The result is a middle-class politics that leverages consumer rights to assert both its place in and power over the state. ‘‘Accountability is key to electability,’’ states Jagannathan (2011), transforming voting publics into consumers on the logic that ‘‘[j]ust as companies have to be accountable to their customers, governments have to be continuously accountable to their people.’’ This was the fine balance that Team Anna thus had to enact: championing a faith in parliamentary and procedural democracy even as it sought to police the very parliamentarians who represented it; appearing politically disin- terested for its continued moral legitimacy, and above all, being an exemplar of the civic virtues, moral uprightness, and professional mannerisms in the image of which it sought to remake politics itself. In short, the Lokpal movement had to be the brand it sought to create. As we write now in 2013, the Lokpal movement has all but fizzled out. Turnouts at a December 2011 rally were dispiritingly low. IAC’s impeccable professionalism appeared to devolve into petty bickering. Their approach to ‘‘corruption’’ turned irretrievably piecemeal, targeting corrupt individuals over ‘‘corruption.’’ The Bill itself was set aside, a ninth time around. Baba Ramdev briefly appeared to occupy the space vacated by Hazare, but then also disappeared. Finally, Kejriwal’s group and Hazare parted ways, the former constituting a new political party and promis- ing a reformulated politics. Even news of a fresh scam, in which the reigning Congress is charged with preferentially allocating coal blocks to mining companies, failed to jostle the once-again apathetic middle classes. Absent of the Lokpal prod- uct (which promised only more bureaucracy to tackle bureaucratic failure anyway) and the associational web it spun, the promise of Brand Anna rang hollow. The brand had perhaps not so much failed as undergone genericide: lost its distinctive- ness and its key instrument, returning IAC’s anti-corruption platform to a generic ‘‘product class’’ (Moore, 2003: 336). But not without first revealing the role of consumption in summoning professional values and class practice into a stance against state corruption, and into a demand that the state be remade in the image of the ‘‘middle class.’’ Both the power of Brand Anna and its fragility were the consequence of its essential immateriality, which was nonetheless material enough for a spectacular middle-class politics.

Acknowledgements The authors express their sincere gratitude to Jacob Copeman, Grant Jun Otsuki, Michael Powell, and the two anonymous reviewers for Journal of Consumer Culture. The essay has also benefitted from discussion comments from Sally Wyatt and other participants at the annual Summer Harvest meetings of the MUSTS (Maastricht University Science, Technology, and Society Studies) research group (September 2012). Different versions of this essay have been presented at Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh (April 2012), the Indian Phantasm conference, University of Oslo (December 2012), the State in Asia conference, Leiden University (December 2012), and the Modern South

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Asia seminar, Leiden University (May 2013). The authors are grateful for the generous feedback offered by various participants at these events.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. Title borrowed from Raman (2011). 2. The hugely popular actor-director of Rang de Basanti, Aamir Khan, emerged as a vocal supporter of Hazare, even sharing the stage with him during the August protests. Khan had acted also in Lagaan, another film striking nationalist chords, and went on to pro- duce a television series called Satyameva Jayte [Truth alone prevails], exposing instances of ‘‘corruption’’ on national television and speaking truth to power in an ‘‘emotional, challenging quest for hope’’ (http://www.satyamevjayate.in/about/). 3. Social networks and blog posts mobilized in support of the Lokpal Bill, however, seemed much more information ‘‘hubs’’ or relay systems rather than sites where the debate on the Bill was actually advanced—directed at informing the public of events, how to volunteer, or where to find out about the content and import of the Bill. Here, participation was generally limited to Facebook ‘‘likes’’ and retweets. Forums such as kafila.org and the comment sections of the major dailies were much more active as conversation spaces, although it would take an entirely different project than the present one to track those systematically. 4. ‘‘Bindass,’’ in Mumbai Hindi slang, means: ‘‘chill’’ or cool, carefree, renegade, pushing boundaries. The channel’s 2010 ‘‘what I am’’ campaign shows ‘‘bindass’’ youth each asserting that ‘‘Just because I’m bindass doesn’t mean I do drugs/ don’t believe in God/ am not serious about my career/ am available’’—reconciling contradictory pulls into a reformulated urban youth identity centering on the definition of ‘‘what I am (not)’’ (Bindass, 2010). 5. Title borrowed from Ganguly (2011).

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Author Biographies Aalok Khandekar is Lecturer in Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University. Situated at the intersection of Cultural Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and South Asian Studies, his current research interests are two-fold. The first focuses on formation of scientific and engineering subjectivities in contemporary Indian contexts. His previous research has focused on the trans- national migrations of Indian engineers under contemporary conditions of globa- lization and the political and ethical transformations that these entail. He continues to develop this work as part of the Maastricht-based research project, ‘Nanotechnology for Development’ (www.nano-dev.org). His second set of research interests hone in on middle-class formation in contemporary Indian con- texts characterized by neoliberal political-economic reorganization.

Deepa S Reddy is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and consults for Human Factors International, a company specializing in UX design. Her research has focused on caste, religious politics, and women’s activism in India, bioethics and genomics among diasporic Indian com- munities, and the role of blood and human substance in defining Indian civic imaginaries. Her book, Religious Identity and Political Destiny: Hindutva in the Culture of Ethnicism, was published in 2006. She lives in Pondicherry and blogs on ethnography and food at www.paticheri.com.

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