Plotting corruption in urban theory

This co-authored book brings together two geographers and a literature and film studies scholar to uncover a complex terrain of corruption in global cities in India. There has been a growing popular concern over corruption in the last three decades. In the early years leading to liberalisation, the state was held as the root cause of corruption and red tape. The term ‘license-permit raj’ was pejoratively used to define this period of state-led development in India. As this characterisation of the state overlapped with the new ‘dawn’ of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation, the market was expected to be the liberator. Since then, the public discourse on corruption has only intensified in India through public outcries on various scams, anti-corruption movements, and so on. And yet, corruption continues to be vague in the way we understand it more materially. Its actors and operations are hugely debated in specific cases within public discourse and yet, conceptually, there exists little understanding of corruption's larger plottings.

This book therefore comes at an interesting juncture. It builds on the existing literature on corruption in South Asia. Akhil Gupta's (1995) pathbreaking work on corruption opened up new conversations looking at the state ethnographically as a spatial intersection of the local, national, and the transnational. He showed that the state does not remain a cohesive entity, but one that is fragmented and dispersed and most importantly, constructed through people’s perception. Since then, corruption has been an important register for anthropologists to study the state. Jeffrey Witsoe's (2011) work showed that the perception of corruption in a state like Bihar corresponds with lower classes finding political power. Nayanika Mathur's (2016) close work on corruption and the desire to stop it in state programmes reveal the larger nature of the developmental state in India.

This book, though on corruption, treads a very different path. By focusing on corruption through land and not specifically through state developmental or welfare schemes, the book opens up another door of analysis. It dilutes the state as necessarily the locus of this corruption. It pegs it at the market. We turn to the geographers here. Michael Goldman's article on Speculative Urbanism (2011) and Llerena Guiu Searle's book, Landscapes of Accumulation (2019) arguably for the first time shifted our attention to a range of corporations, big land developers, builders, and investors that make up the real estate market. Searle called them new ‘routes of accumulation’. Since then, we have had a range of writing which stitch together big real estate players, land speculation, and global capital.

Ranganathan et al., bring in two different things to this conceptual turn. First, rather than look at spatial transformation as accumulation that geographers have usually done, they introduce corruption as their analytical core. Second, this book takes on the urban question at different scales – at the scale of global capital, but also at the material conflicts over cities that it generates. As a result, it destabilises two very important commonsensical notions about corruption – (1) that corruption always emanates from inefficient state systems. This myth has been particularly propagated to justify markets and their entry in core public goods. This book punctures this myth. It shows how highly efficient corporations engender large-scale horizontal corruption that goes unseen. (2) It ruptures this tale of the ethical, moral middle class for whom corruption has become a hugely emotive issue. Following huge uproar over government scams as well as the huge anti-corruption movement, the tax-paying urban middle class often paints itself as the flagbearers of "war against corruption". However, looking at corruption around land shows that the middle class is also deeply compromised when it comes to corruption around land. This analysis stands out because the same middle class which ordinarily is too ready to rage over state's corruption is willing to turn a blind eye to the market's corruption. Therefore unlike the state, which the middle class has already declared guilty, the market still remains in their perception a corruption-free legitimate institution.

Consequently, the book also disaggregates the nature of the ‘public’ through caste and its deep tentacles into property regimes. Inspired by racial capitalism, Corruption Plots is one of the few academic texts which examine the complicity of caste and property in India. Caste unwittingly becomes that faultline around which these publics marked by dispossession and grabs get created. And in doing this, the book also uncovers the material construction of corruption through caste. This explains why then anti-corruption movements in India explain one kind of corruption and remain absolutely silent on the other which I believe is one of the most important claims of the book.

Corruption Plots deploys an intelligent use of the metaphor of the ‘Plot’. On one hand, plots refer to land parcels as sites of material conflicts. We see local farmers, mafia, big realtors, politicians, civic organisations. But on the other hand, they are also ‘plots’ in a fictional sense. ‘Corruption’ cannot be evidenced. It also almost always exists in people's narrations of long drawn out experience of dispossession. As researchers, we access corruption through narratives as we are never really witnesses to these events. The book takes this methodological intervention further by incorporating vignettes from both films and novels that animate all such moves of corruption through fictionalised accounts of real occurrences. But there is yet another way in which even real accounts can possibly always be seen as ‘fictions’. Any ‘true’ account is always mediated by the author or the perception of a person. How does then one parse between what could be real, metaphorical and fictional?

But while the use of fictional accounts adds to the novelty of the text, it also takes away from it. Sometimes, long-drawn discussion of a film or a novel takes away from a more involved discussion of the relations between land, corruption, and global capital. As a result, the book does not quite fully exploit the opportunity that it created for itself – of trying to tell a multiscalar story of corruption at the global as well as the local level at the same time. The actual connections and machinations surrounding corruption remain unclear. This is also exacerbated by the choice of a bird's eyeview of corruption across two cities where some of these ground-level interrelationships remain less explored.

For example, we meet ‘scambusters’ who have taken it up as their life's work to unearth land scams. But the book does not take us further into their backstory of why they do the work they do. While we discuss one particular ‘sting operation’, but I wanted to see more of what the daily work of waging wars against corruption looks like. What kind of narratives of corruption do we see shaping up from their daily work of filing RTIs, political organising, collaborating with other civil society activists? Similarly, while organisations like Money Life Foundation which claim to stand for transparency to undercut the ‘corruption’ of vote bank politics, make flash appearances through the book, but we never really get into their origins and networks. I understand that finding definitive connections may not be possible. But even indicating plausible linkages and trajectories could have added to the cogency of the book.

More importantly, corruption has largely been studied by ethnographers and political scientists in the South Asian context, whereas geographers have mostly used the lens of accumulation. What changes when geographers use an unfamiliar lens of corruption to study land? What do they have to offer that is possibly different from what anthropologists have told us about corruption?

I feel this question is absolutely crucial to unpack because it is at the heart of the book. Urban geographers have looked at the creation of publics through speculation. (2022). Would these speculative publics naturally map onto Ranganthan et al.'s corrupt publics? Clearly, they see speculation and corruption as related. But conceptually speaking, what are then the overlaps and the divergences between publics of speculation and publics of corruption?

While the book raises the important question of caste and notions of corruption, these relations remain obfuscated in the book owing to these methodological choices. But Corruption Plots despite its limitations is an ambitious effort which attempts to innovate on both the question of scale as well as method and for that it is an important text for our times. But more importantly, it opens up completely new directions of thinking about corruption and land and turns a critical eye towards how corruption creates new publics in urban spaces. And to me, these are extremely valuable takeaways from the book.