Two Cheers For Corruption?

What is Corruption? 
Corruption, I was once taught, is the the use of public office for private gain. It is allegedly illegal and immoral, besides being harmful to a nation's economy. But why, I've always asked, does it persist in most of the world for most of human civilization?

The most common answer is that corruption is akin to theft, and the reasons for corruption ultimately boil down to selfishness, greed and a host of other human vices. But if this tragic account of human nature holds any validity, we are all corrupt (or potentially corrupt), though lacking in the same opportunities to indulge in it. This line of reasoning may even cause some of us to pity ourselves: if only we had more opportunities to be corrupt, our natural vices would take care of the rest...

But this moral argument explains too much as well as too little. If everyone is equally corrupt in theory, nothing remains to be explained. In that case, cause and effect coincide: people are corrupt because they are innately so. This is a non-explanation.  Clearly, we must look for answers elsewhere.

An Alternative Hypothesis
Let me propose an hypothesis that runs counter to conventional wisdom: private gain is one of the chief purposes of holding public office. Shocked? I expect readers to be so. We are all so used to thinking about public office in the exalted terms of civics textbooks that we typically fail to understand that the "state" is not a mythical sea-monster, Leviathan. The state, instead, ought to be better understood as the sum of power relationships in society that are deemed legitimate in the eyes of the law. To the extent that a nation's laws buttress patriarchal authority within a family, the monarch-like rule of the father-husband is as much a part of the constitutional order of things as legislatures or courts. For our purposes, therefore, the classical liberal distinction between the public and private realms needs to be put aside.

Defining the state in this manner avoids reducing corruption to a simple matter of individual virtue and vice. We now see the state as embedded in society with its messy power equations ready to upset any technocrat's grand institutional designs. For no one is above board entirely, except, as the ancient Greeks and Romans believed, the mythical lawgiver in a society. The everyday reality of society is, then, a series of overlapping struggles for wealth, honor, and virtue. It is not only about the rich fighting the poor, but also rich women positioning themselves above their poorer counterparts. Insofar as the state endows laws and policies with an official sanctity, the overlapping struggles in a given moment influence the distribution of power and resources in the future. Victory in one sphere of struggle may be reinforced in others just as easily as they might be undercut in others. Public office is thus nothing more than a means to a pre-determined end.

However, the distribution of power in society varies across time and place. In pluralistic or "polyarchic" societies, the same elites do not win every battle. Instead, power is distributed widely across multiple nodes in society. Capturing power in one sphere of the state does not imply that the winner takes all. Winning the battle for gay rights does not necessarily mean you will also be able to raise taxes on the rich. The use of public office for private gain is rampant in such societies as are accusations of the same. Absolutely no one is above suspicion.  In "monoarchic" societies, however, this is not the case. Oligopolistic interests concentrate power in closed circles, and social policies and laws reflect these interests. Public interest ends up being defined by the ruling oligarchs of the day, and the few individual deviations from this definition of public interest is denounced vociferously and even criminalized.

The Curious Modernity of Corruption
Now, corruption is an interesting term. It simultaneously functions as a modern economic term as well as a term of moral opprobrium. The modernity of corruption is not unsurprising. Its origins lie in the rise of Protestantism in Europe, which saw, among its principal tasks, a vigorous attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church. In western Europe, the triumph of Protestantism is inseparable from the triumph of capitalism over the medieval church, the aristocracy, and the peasantry. Whether in Germany, the Low Countries or in England, the modern attack on corruption accompanied the ultimate victory of the bourgeoisie on the Continent. With imperialism, the Protestant ethic at the heart of capitalism came to assume a global form. On this view of global society, heathens in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were corrupt and depraved creatures in need of salvation. The Bible held the key to salvation as much as markets and the modern state did. Corruption was backward, pre-modern, medieval. Salvation lay in the modern doctrine of progress.

We may not be all Keynesians now, but we are possibly all Protestant capitalists now. Economics is the study of capitalist markets today. Political science concerns "governance" of these markets. Anthropology studies the primitive Other, whether in Papua New Guinea and Nebraska or in car factories in Detroit and Gurgaon. Philosophy is the logical apparatus that binds together the modern bourgeois disciplines. Taking a step back from the indoctrination that lies at the heart of the modern civilizing mission, we can appreciate how Euroamerican modernity, based on the triumph of the Protestant bourgeoisie over the old feudal order, involves a decisive shift towards the rule of a single class. Knowledge and the state reflect this concentration of power in the hands of the few.

Champions of Euroamerican modernity, however, exist in the non-West too. In societies as different as India and Egypt, the last eighteen months have seen strong movements led by the urban bourgeoisie to take over partial welfarist regimes and remake them in their own image. To label these movements "popular" and "national" uprisings is very much part of the game. Paid news and intellectuals have filled out newspapers and magazines with their rants against the corruption of the state. What we need is efficiency and transparency, they say, but what they do not say is that they want to redefine public interest vis-a-vis their own private interests. For this noble cause, it is not at all puzzling that new-age religious leaders and foreign-funded social entrepreneurs have joined hands. Neither is it puzzling that the proudly apolitical youth of Gurgaon and Cairo   have discovered the pleasures of collective effervescence in virtual worlds.

Monoarchy versus Polyarchy
Corruption, our new-age reformers tell us, is rife at the lower levels of the state, especially in the countryside.   By this, we must understand that the urban bourgeoisie in these postcolonial societies have little control over rural power dynamics. Particular ill-will has been directed in India, for example, against elected politicians in the government. They are not just corrupt, but criminals too. Instead of seeing these politicians as simply conduits or brokers in a larger con-game, they are being presented before us as the ringleaders. Of course, this is only to be expected when leading corporate houses fund the anti-corruption crusaders and award paid leave to their employees to facilitate protests. Tellingly, the corporate crusaders have offered an extra-constitutional solution in which they and those they handpick will have the power to override all elected and non-elected officialdom in the land. This is the ultimate prize: complete control of the state by a class in the ascendancy. Monoarchy, in short.

Needless to say, these designs have not been successful until date. Ultimately, their lack of success boils down to a single reason: the competition between the urban bourgeoisie and other sections of society in the domain of the state. In India, for instance, the upper-caste bourgeoisie are not so preponderant as to obliterate powerful rural and anti-capitalist interests. Multiple competing political interests acting in the name of "the people" and accusing each other of the worst possible crimes, thus remains the norm. Corruption is thriving, as it rightly should, in a polyarchic society in which the state becomes the site of myriad struggles for power and justice alike. The nature of modernity in these polyarchic societies refuses to be a mere replica of Euroamerican originals. Nor does a CCP-like party emerge to produce a prostrate public to do its bidding. The shift to a monoarchic social order remains a distant dream for our bourgeois reformers in the postcolony.

The battle is far from over yet. I fully expect the urban bourgeoisie to try harder next time, and co-opt a few farmers, barbers, and cooks to display their "democratic" commitments. I also expect them to work within the government to award bailouts to wealthy individuals and corporations rather than reserve them for "wasteful" social expenditures. Nonetheless, I am quite hopeful for the future. While capitalist interests may grow stronger, their social rivals are likely to match them blow for blow. Above all, one may repose faith in our common apathy and cynicism towards those who seek to reform us. What for, we ask, and how much is it worth to you? We can still see and point to the Emperor's nakedness in ways that our peers in the West have long lost. Two cheers for corruption, then? 

Being Middle Class in India

When we hear the term "middle class," we tend naturally to imagine the average or median person in a society. Roughly, we might justifiably believe that the term refers to a class of individuals earning an annual income roughly equal to or around the per capita GDP of a country. A large middle class has, since Aristotle, been seen as a key ingredient of a stable polity insofar as it balances competing societal interests. Moreover, a large and growing middle class is often seen as the sign of a healthy modern democracy.

In India, however, with an annual per capita income of roughly $1,200 (Rs. 55,000), the situation is rather different. To be middle class is not so much to be an average Indian in income terms, but to enjoy the status of a Western-educated professional and to consume a basket of commodities that comes with that status. For Americans studying Indian or South Asian society, this is puzzling or even odd. Yet Indians (or Pakistanis or Bangladeshis) rarely think critically about what it means to be middle class. Is it not bizarre that, after nearly 65 years of independence, Westernization remains the basis for being middle class in India?

To my mind, the only explanation for this state of affairs lies in the peculiar history of this class of men and women in the subcontinent. It is well-known that the social origins of this class lie in the colonial period when a class of professional men were inducted into the colonial bureaucracy as "babus" or clerks, and later, as civil servants in the three Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. As products of a Macaulyite education, they no longer received a "traditional" education in Persian, Sanskrit or Tamil, but Western literary and scientific learning in English. Under the new system of education, correctly identifying the five causes for Clive's victory at Plassey or mimicking Macaulay's florid prose in an exam could hold the key to government jobs and social prestige. Rote-and-regurgitate represented the joint triumph of brahminism and colonialism in nineteenth-century India. Babus or clerks in the lower rungs of the colonial bureaucracy were certainly inferior to members of the provincial or the covenanted civil services. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers, too, joined middle-class ranks to sustain the fledgling civil society among the natives of the Presidencies. Above them were the ruling caste of white men and women; below them were the vast labouring populations of the subcontinent who lacked the "civility" to be part of the urban elite clubs of the day. "Middle" thus implied comprador more than median or average.

Postcolonial India inherited colonial civil society with its Westernized middle class. This is because the Gandhian nationalist movement did little to alter the class structure of Indian society; indeed, it concretized the deepest prejudices and injustices in late colonial India. In the 1950s, at the top were the IAS/IFS/IPS cadres, the armed forces, and a handful of well-to-do barristers, doctors, and professors; below them, babus, clerks and petty businessmen formed the lower middle class. The Nehruvian upper middle class basically assumed the privileges of the colonial ruling caste with much enthusiasm. "English rule without Englishmen," Gandhi had warned in Hind Swaraj, would simply mean retaining the tiger's nature after getting rid of the tiger per se. But that is, of course exactly, what Nehru and his ilk sought in their quest to put India on the world map. To compete with their former colonizers, India, they argued, ought to mimic and outdo them at their own game. To speak English fluently and to affect Western manners were usually enough to be a member of the privileged middle class across urban India. The actual incomes earned by these men (and they were usually men!) were nothing to boast about, but the prestige their status in society commanded could not be weighed in purely monetary terms. It would have been regarded as crass to unfavourably compare, for instance, an IAS officer's salary to the earnings of a well-to-do timber contractor or mill owner. Nehruvian India had no place for such crassness; its manners were impeccably English.

Capitalism itself, for the Nehrvian elite, was a dirty word. Science became the buzz word for the nation-builders who wished the state would control and regulate the economy and polity. Education, in the post-independence polity, meant a smattering of English education alongside large doses of mathematical, scientific and other technical formulae. Naturally, this kind of policy shift meant an expansion of the existing boundaries of the Indian middle class to incorporate the engineers who would build big dams and managers who would run public sector companies efficiently. Nehru, who had been a third-rate student of chemistry at Cambridge, had ironically made his name writing historical and political treatises. Yet he inaugurated a science-focused expansion of middle class India to buttress his socialist theory of government. The new techno-managerial parvenu class, however, lacked the social graces of their more Westernized contemporaries in the '50s and '60s. They, therefore, ended up being slotted between the upper and lower middle classes, envying the former and despising the latter. Although products of the new postcolonial programme of science, the techno-managerial middle class remained much attached to the "vernacular" modes of life they had left behind in their small towns and villages. Hostile towards the Westernized values and lifestyles of their social superiors, they fell back on an indigenous conservatism in habits and mores that emphasized their earthiness as much as their aspirations. Keen to overtake their Westernized superiors, the vernacular middle classes remained cheerlessly within the Nehruvian regime of socialism.

In response to Indira Gandhi's well-calculated populism, the vernacular middle classes were restless for social change. The Garibi Hatao agenda followed from solid Nehruvian foundations, yet it was compromised by the political alliances made by the Indira Congress in the states. When alternative leadership in the form of the Jan Sangh or parties led by rising middle-caste leaders such as Charan Singh emerged, they unsurprisingly caught the imagination of the vernacular middle classes. To speak as "the people" in one unanimous voice against a tyrannical government seemed to bring to mind the stratagems of Gandhian mass politics. The homegrown conservatism of those resentful of the Westernized Nehruvian middle class came to the fore in the JP movement of the mid-'70s. (The Nehruvian middle class, by contrast, tended to support the Emergency as a necessary evil: after all, trains ran on time, and corruption could be curbed.) It did not matter whether one's ideological convictions swayed left or right, because both could be accommodated in the fight against the tyranny of the Westernized woman and her cronies in power. The lower middle classes in cities as well as rural elites ended up as significant allies in the fight against the dictatorship of Mrs. Gandhi's government. When the Janata government came to power, it banned Coca-Cola and other Western evils because it ostensibly poisoned the young virile men and fecund women of India. Similarly, it opened diplomatic talks with China after Mao's death, a sharp departure from the foreign policy of the Westward-looking Congress regime. Swadeshi, not socialism, became the new buzzword for this short-lived foray by the new middle classes into mainstream politics in India.

Although the Janata government is a forgotten episode in Indian political history, it is worth looking back today to recognize the origins of contemporary middle-class politics in the late '70s. Swadeshi was always a charade that had gone too far. Soon, Sanjay Gandhi had given the middle classes the opportunity to buy Maruti cars manufactured with the assistance of Suzuki Motors in Japan. Then, with rising incomes in the '80s, came the opportunity to buy more goods made in India and abroad. Flourishing markets in smuggled and second-handed clothes, toys, food items, etc, found excited buyers among all those with the money to buy them. The country's import and forex restrictions remained hurdles though, until a cuddly Sardarji in a light blue turban cut loose the remaining shackles that bound the feet of the Indian middle class consumer. Looking every bit like the Air India Maharaja, he became, curiously enough, its very antithesis. Shackles cut and hurdles removed, middle class India set about accumulating wealth and goods sans ideology, morality or any of those old-fashioned words that held back their forefathers. Something like the gold rush had begun. Here was an opportunity to radically remake the class hierarchies of Nehruvian India, besides stomping out the last embers of its socialist ways. The Nehruvian middle classes, distinctly uncomfortable in this new milieu, made haste to follow the Brits outside the country, whether in racist America or Australia or in declining Britain and Europe. Those who remained tethered to Indian shores were forced to compete with those they regarded as their social inferiors, Hindiwallahs, Marathi manooses, Kannadigas, Punjabi refugees and others. Some won, some lost, the winners often ending up isolated as intellectual, artistic, and cultural elites. But the overarching story of the past two decades is the political and economic ascendancy of the growing vernacular middle classes in India.

The vernacular middle classes are not a homogeneous lot, of course. There are sharp gradations between earlier and later entrants to middle class ranks. Often enough, two generations of Western schooling still counts for twice the social privileges of someone with a single generation of formal rote learning. Sometimes, however, a bloke from the country sneaks up on his social superiors and beats them to the much-prized engineering programmes at an IIT. Or a small-town boy makes it big as an entrepreneur. These exceptions to the rule nonetheless do not threaten the overall class structure of urban India. Westernization today means American ways of speaking and living rather than the older colonial or English habits of the Nehruvian elite. The Westernized Indian settled in the US is now the envy of the Indian middle class family. Domestic imitations of the same occupy second place in the new caste system. Those below them lack the linguistic and cultural familiarity with contemporary Western ways, though they struggle to acquire it slowly but steadily.

A strong disdain for the rural and the folk unites the new Indian middle classes even as they experiment with new forms of conservatism and indigenism. Emerging as they do out of the Nehruvian vision of scientific high modernism, they retain a firm dislike towards these "backward" social formations. These are forms of life that must dissolve into the pages of history, not haunt the present and future of India. Pro-poor politics is seen as implicitly pro-poverty, which is how the legacy of Nehruvian socialism is interpreted today in middle class India. The Left is largely obsolete from this perspective. The Centre itself has shifted rightwards on the ideological spectrum. Virulent nationalism, instead of being the last resort of the scoundrel, is a badge of honour and pride. Nationalism requires a coherent cultural ideology, and Hindutva offers this. Hindutva is an alternative, as Savarkar cogently argued, to the everyday superstitions and stupidities of popular Hinduism over the ages. It is, at core, ruthlessly instrumental and modern in its rationality. Such a thoroughly secular ideology, indeed epistemology, dovetails nicely with the training of the techno-managerial modernist trained, ironically enough, in Nehruvian IITs and IIMs. National pride thus connotes Hindu civilizational pride, which necessarily entails a demonization of Muslims, Christians, and other marginalized social groups. Hindu pride also connotes a revival of older nationalistic idioms of virile masculinity and subservient femininity in the home and the world. Caste is treated as a matter of the past, even as virtually every Hindutva-approved marriage follows strict caste lines. The bizarre spectacle of caste- and region-specific matrimonial websites today thus ties the virtual world of Hindu conservatism with its everyday social realities.

Cloaking this conservative ideology is the virtuous appearance of being opposed to politics (anti-political"). After all, isn't the spiritual father of the contemporary middle classes, the Sardarji in the Blue Turban, the symbol of anti-politics? Politics, on this view, is not an activity that pits competing social interests and ideas against each other, but a corrupt, pernicious one that weakens and destabilizes the nation. The only kind of politics is thus anti-politics, which means technocracy in the language of what is now called "governance." Proper nationalistic political conduct takes the form of problem-solving. As good positivists, the  aim is to reduce the messy complexities of social problems into solvable problems. If adivasis are located atop valuable minerals, simply displace them at the earliest to acquire land for profitable and patriotic nation-building activities. In solving social problems so peremptorily, the prejudices of caste and creed themselves transparently. The rule of experts in technical domains of life correspond to the rule of new-age gurus in the private sphere. This is not so much a separation of the public and private, but one realm reinforcing another. It is commonplace today, therefore, for someone designing her house along the lines of Vastu Shastra to claim scientific validity for her action. The public slides into the private realm and vice-versa. Just as politics is debilitating in a polity, so too are divorce, homosexuality, liberated women, dalits, adivasis, Muslims, etc. To be anti-political is, therefore, to be above the conflicting claims and contestations that democracy inevitably throws up. It is, in other words, an authoritarian stance that is deeply wedded to the status quo and hostile to progressive social change.

The bulk of the middle classes in India today are new to these ranks, i.e., they have spent either a generation or two enjoying the social privileges of this class. The latest figures tell us that roughly 25-30% of India's 1.2 billion people are now middle class. Above them is a small slice of billionaires and millionaires (or arabpatis and crorepatis), and below are more than 70% of the country excluded at present from middle-class citizenship. The older colonial or Nehruvian middle classes continue to retain some of their social privileges in India and abroad, but they are increasingly drawn into competition with the nouveau riches. It is not always the case that the Nehruvians win these battles. Among those earning between Rs. 2.5 to10 lacs annually ($5,500 to 22,000), roughly four to sixteen times the per capita income, the Nehruvians are less than a fifth. Among those earning over Rs. 10 lacs ($22,000), the Nehruvians are even fewer, perhaps not even a tenth. The postcolonial middle classes thus consist overwhelmingly of those whose fortunes rely on techno-managerial and/or commercial occupations, social conservatism, and an "anti-political" political orientation.

It should hardly surprise us, therefore, when this class of people, probably no more than a fifth of the country's population, claims to speak for all of India in one voice. This sleight of hand is remarkable as much for its utter blindness to existing social realities as for its wholesome disdain for those below on the social ladder. We are India, nothing else matters. This is the new slogan of the contemporary middle classes in India. When, therefore, they come out onto the streets in support of Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption, do not be puzzled. Those whose have never known better are now gathered to direct public policy in accordance with their class interests. To subvert democracy in the name of democracy will be a fitting agenda for the contemporary middle classes. Hoisting up the bastard by his own petard, as it were. For such a class, the old ideological divisions of Left and Right matter no longer. Cultural nationalism seeks to paper over any social differences that might threaten the sacred nation and its boundaries. To win at all costs, as in cricket matches, is the only option. Welcome to this brave new world, my friends...

On the Delhi Metro

As the grey train hurtled towards me on that gloomy day, I stood still and waited in anticipation of what lay in store for me aboard. I felt muscles twitch as a general air of uneasiness spread around me. Soon, the grey train opened its doors to us and exclaimed, "HUDA City Centre." My fellow passengers ran helter-skelter and sought desperately to seat themselves. Confused, I read the bright green signs that urged me not to sit on seats reserved for women, the elderly, and physically challenged persons. I wandered down to the next compartment. It was almost empty. I wondered why others didn't join me. Perhaps there's nothing like the warmth of humanity in winter.

In two minutes, we were at the next station, IFFCO Chowk, and in another two minutes, at MG Road station. Office clerks, call center employees, college

students, housewives, children, and senior citizens scrambled in through the doors to find places to sit. I pulled out a book and pretended to read. On my left sat a couple eager to know each other better. This quiet, brooding call-center employee sat listening to his partner's endless explanations for what she perceived as her inadequacies. "You know I feel my English and Hindi are worsening here in Gurgaon. I really did speak well in Bara Banki." Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend. "You know I don't really drink. It was just that one time when my Assamese flatmates forced me to drink and I got so drunk that I puked all night. These Assamese girls do it every week. I just don't know how they manage!" Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend again. "I hope you don't believe all the rumors about me in the office. They're all lies." Let's go, he said this time, the station's here.

"Guru Dronacharya," the announcer screamed. What a delicious irony that the ancient Mahabharata tale about Gurgaon has found favor with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation in 2010!

In walked Old Father Time himself through the gates. Dressed in a yellow silk kurta and a Nehru jacket, Father Time smiled and seated himself next to me. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Patel Chowk," I replied. "Long way to go, my boy. These coaches are old, you see, but the new ones they've got will be faster and smoother without the jerkiness we have now." Hmmm, I responded, wondering how he knew about the DMRC's plans. I suppose my laconic responses put off the old man. So he began talking to a rotund gentleman who seemed intrigued by the tidbit about the new coaches. "Bhaisahab, there is no hope for us Hindus nowadays. See how the government equivocates when it comes to terrorism. They didn't even want to hang Afzal Guru." Bhaisahab concurred: "And now they speak of Hindu terror. What a travesty!" That comment clearly struck a chord. It promised to pave the way for a long discourse on minority appeasement and Hindu insecurities in contemporary India. But nothing of the sort happened because a young, bespectacled man in a skullcap and sherwani stood beside us. The joys of Indian secularism!

If you look outside from the window of your metro coach

on the Delhi-Gurgaon route, you will discover much that had been hitherto hidden. Greenery everywhere with only small shanties breaking up the verdant landscape. Hardly any people to be seen in this bustling metropolis bursting at its seams. The orderliness of the armed forces inside their residential colonies. The opulence of farmhouses that are exposed now to the public eye. And the elegance of the Qutb Minar towering over Mehrauli. Thereafter, we are creatures of the dark in the underworld. Who knows what's happening above us? A mosque had been demolished that day, in fact, and Mathura Road and its vicinity were jam-packed with cars. But we couldn't know that inside our metro compartments. What we did see and know, however, is that we were packed together with a motley bunch of human specimens with different colors and smells enveloping us. The rough-and-ready manner of democracy, Indian-style.

Aboard the Metro, we were left to decide whether to offer seats to ladies and older people.

Every time someone offered his seat to a lady (not often!)he seemed positively pleased with himself. The elderly were not so lucky. They had to request seats, explaining that they had a long distance to travel, and even then, sitting could not be guaranteed. When an old lady came in at Jorbagh, ostensibly after cleaning some posh houses there, no one bothered when she asked for a seat. She deserved a seat under two of the three categories of the "abnormal" (old and female), but she apparently did not know that the unwritten class dynamics of Delhi had permeated underground into the Metro too. Unwritten also meant unspoken since no one offered an explanation for their rudeness: they simply looked away or continued talking as if they had not heard the woman at all. When I offered my seat to the lady, a young student with his ears plugged to his I-Pod threatened to shove his way ahead of her. I had to physically block his way to let her sit. Everyone looked displeased. An unwritten, unspoken law of the city had been broken.

Another such law concerns women. The DMRC has recently extended North India's zenana culture into the public transport system of the future. A reserved coach for women essentially means segregation. It is quite obvious that the majority of women will choose to avoid getting

their butts pinched or breasts grabbed in the other coaches. But with the new reserved coach for women, the "normal" passengers (male, aged 15-60 years) can rule the roost elsewhere and ignore the bright green signs that dare to impose a kind of civility in the early days of the Metro. Butt-pinching and breast-grabbing are now perfectly acceptable in three-quarters of every Metro train. Indeed, they are vital to maintaining the new zenana culture: "segregate, or else we'll, molest you" is the message to women.

On my way back, two call-center employees sat beside me all the way to Gurgaon. They seemed less-than-thrilled by their jobs. But they were even less thrilled by their friend Raghu, who seemed to them to be engaged forever in long telephonic conversations with his girlfriend. "What's there to talk to these bitches? They're good to fuck now and then after work. And it's great on the weekends. But there's nothing really to talk to them about." His misogynist co-worker agreed heartily: "I don't waste my time like that. Better to go out drinking with your buddies. Or stay home playing video games. These bitches are so demanding: if you get talking to them, they won't let you do anything else in life." This is how the "normal" passengers of the Metro are expected to behave. The misogyny of the streets is normalized now as it gets braided with the zenana culture of the old courtly elites. This is the culture of neoliberalism: selective appropriation of cultural pasts to reinforce existing power equations.

But neoliberalism is not simply trade liberalization and privatization,as many are wont to believe. The Delhi Metro is a dramatic statement by the Government of India in an era where the rotten core of private sector corporations has come to the fore like never before. Leviathan, too, can be efficient and profitable as it builds critical infrastructure and breathes life anew into the city. The state, as entrepreneur as well as regulator, is the new face of neoliberal reforms in India. If M-NREGA

is its most visible face in rural India today, the Delhi Metro is the blueprint for urban transformations in India today. Move over, Narayan Murthy and the BATF. Metro coaches are awash with public sector advertisements for yoga and naturopathy from the Health Ministry and mobile and internet plans from MTNL and BSNL. The state continue to enforce the writ of the law throughout the metro station. If you spit or travel without tokens, be prepared to pay a hefty fine. If you enter the women's coach forcibly, be prepared to be pulled out by a cop policing the gendered borderlands between the coaches. And don't urinate on the platform or clamber atop the train! The government hopes to impose a distinctly bourgeois civility on those whose notions of morality are characteristically different. It is not clear yet who or what will prevail.

There is no doubt that the Delhi Metro is the best thing to happen to the Capital for decades. Delhi lacks the planning apparatus of Mumbai or Bangalore. It is a segregated city that offers innumerable opportunities to the new migrant even as it blocks off many others. The Metro re-engages the energies of young aspirants to middle-class rank and privilege. It brings the city together in unprecedented ways, yet re-inscribes older prejudices of gender, age, and class in a neoliberal garb. In the stations and trains, the democratic populism of the streets battles the neoliberal moral order directed by the government. Little wonder then that the mall-going India Shining public shies away from the Metro: it is too plebeian for their tastes. And yet their college-going children may well end up sweating and scrambling beside less-privileged passengers who look and smell so different from them. In this tortured, tortuous way, the promise of the modern city comes alive and the century-old legacies of the colonial capital threaten to fall apart.

The Spirit of Guy Fawkes This November

Did the spirit of Guy Fawkes visit us this November? WikiLeaks and the Radia Tapes in India have exposed the hollowness of our rulers and their cronies in the media, in big business, and the army. Some of us distrusted them anyway, but now, the evidence is before everyone. Suddenly, it's not the Maoists or Al-Qaeda or some such phantom in the news. It's the state and its allies.

The emptiness of neoliberal "governance" also now stands exposed. We were told that smaller government would mean a more vibrant civil society. The media appeared to be a symbol of that vibrant civil society. Ordinary people can only express shock and dismay at events well beyond their control. Now alas, the grand strategy of neoliberalism has been exposed now as rotten to its core.

Nearly four hundred years after his public execution, Guy Fawkes remains significant for us. What we call freedom might be simply servitude. What we call rights might be merely legal fictions. What we call civil society might be simply a chicken coop belonging to our masters. John Locke, often considered to be the bourgeois philosopher par excellence, had a simple solution to this problem: dissolve an unresponsive, unaccountable government by exercising one's right to rebel. It is unclear what Locke thought of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but it is quite apparent that the audacious radicalism of Fawkes' actions reverberated down to Locke's age. The Second Treatise of Government opens with an assault on the divine rights of rulers and ends with the conditions under which governments no longer deserve our allegiance. This is the essence of modern democracy. It is nothing without its radical edge. If we ever needed a reminder, this November has given us two.

Why Poverty and Underdevelopment Cannot Explain Maoism

Every now and then, someone comes up to me and explains why poverty and underdevelopment are the "real" causes of the Maoist rebellions in India today. Usually, I listen patiently, trying hard to contain my annoyance at the crude materialist suggestion, and then pose a simple question to my interlocutor: "Well, what causes poverty and underdevelopment then?" At this point, there is occasionally a reference to development as an onward march to economic and social progress, which implies that some folks are condemned to play catch up in the grand parlor game of modernity. More often, however, there is silence.

Let's start at the beginning though. Assume that poverty and underdevelopment do, in fact, cause agrarian rebellions. It follows then that, in income terms, poorer areas and peoples are more likely to rebel than richer ones. Development data would predict the BIMARU states as the loci of rebellion since 1947. But Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh are not part of the so-called Red Corridor, whereas West Bengal, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Orissa are. Now the wily materialist might urge me to look at district-level data to check whether poverty and rebellion are correlated. Again, income falls short as an explanation. The poorest districts are spread far and wide, from Kalahandi in Orissa to Dangs in Gujarat. Most of these districts are not under the Home Ministry's scanner. Of course, we could go even deeper at sub-district or block level or at the village or household levels. Are the poorest blocks, villages, and households the prime movers of anti-state activities? Field research by many, including myself, suggests not. At every level of analysis, therefore, the materialist thesis fails.

Yet materialism is popular among the chatteratti in Delhi and elsewhere. Somehow, in a neoliberal age, everyone seems to have morphed into vulgar Marxists. A number of well-known academics and activists lead the chorus; journalists and their readers follow. Not a single media report has contested a flimsy, even false, argument. Why? I want to suggest a hypothesis here: this is the most convenient apolitical response by so-called civil society in India that effectively denies the link between elite consumption in urban India and the exploitation of resources and peoples located in the Maoist areas. The Delhi chatteratti cannot survive without the ubiquitous adivasi maid from Jharkhand or raise questions regarding the kind of "development" pursued by the modern state in India since 1947. It must come up with an apolitical alternative that protects its narrow interests. Materialism is a convenient myth that puts the blame entirely on the state. Even Chidambaram and his cronies accept it. It's their predecessors who went wrong, they say. Jean Dreze and his accomplices then lend legitimacy to this neoliberal myth, and foolishly sign on to the state's sinister designs to "develop" certain areas. Development here means not freedom from disease, illiteracy, and oppression, as Amatya Sen tells us, but state contracts to multinational corporations to carve out spheres of influence wherever they are resources to be exploited. It's the last great enclosure of the modern age, and there's a fortune to be made for the state and its corporate cronies. Some people, we're told, need to catch up with the times. Or else...

Next, consider the other modern myth, that of the Malevolent Maoist. He is a gun-toting maniac who spews a rotten ideology that preaches revolution and regards 1947 as the start of a second colonial age. They pilfer state development funds and weapons depots, and then lead luxurious lives and rape local women, including those within their cadres. Malevolent Maoists, we are told to believe, spread their tentacles among the poor, who are presumably foolish enough to fall for any trick. They're illiterate, naked, and starving after all. Unlike we who sit in seminar rooms and airconditioned cafes to pronounce judgments on the rest of the planet. We, especially academics and activists, must indulge in state-directed development to redeem these poor, foolish rural folks that are falling prey to the Malevolent Maoist. Although I feel like puking on some of those who tell me such stories, the intellectual in me pushes me towards a calm response. The real problem here is the political impotence of the Indian leftist, whether as academic or as activist. They can no longer pretend to be part of some revolutionary vanguard, representing subaltern struggles in word and action. They are hostage to their professionalism, which necessarily prevents meaningful political engagements with the messy, illiberal world of subaltern politics. History and literature appeals most to our leftist academics: there is simply no need to engage with the present or the real. For our middle-class urban activists, it is usually a simple canned ideology that must be imposed on the hapless sods out there. Doing something is better than nothing, I am often told. But doing something harmful is worse than doing nothing.

And that brings me to how urban academics and activists have been superseded by a class of rural intellectuals who have a deeper understanding of popular grievances and struggles in the Indian countryside and can better represent subaltern claims within a democratic setup. These subaltern leaders speak the languages of their communities as well as the modern state. It is easy to dismiss them as brokers or go-betweens. But they are leaders in their own right. How else can one understand why these so-called Maoist leaders carry out social audits of public works programs such as NREGA or cooperate with honest NGOs? And still, they wield their guns to extract "taxes" from local businesses and to target scoundrels in and outside the state on a case-by-case basis. Violence is selective, a form of subaltern claim-making articulated in ways are justified usually in moral terms. Although active participants in rebel ranks are limited, support for the rebels is widespread. Some people feed and house them; others help organize public meetings to discuss local problems and potential solutions; and yet others build houses for poorer members of a village community or wells and watersheds for the entire village, often with government or NGO assistance. It is hardly surprising that villagers will support young men from their communities who will benefit them materially and politically further their aims.

Is it rebellion at all then? Well, yes, but not a revolutionary one. Scholars and laypersons tend to equate rebellions and revolutions as popular anti-state actions that seek regime change. We do not have a vocabulary or theory to explain rebellions that do not seek to turn the world upside down or overthrow the state. But for better or worse, this is what we must do in the present context. We need to understand how violence, used selectively, can become an effective weapon of the weak under certain conditions to force social change from above. Those conditions refer to a kind of political domination that is not so totalizing that it can be softened up by collective action from below. In other words, these conditions are not found in fascist and other authoritarian regimes. Many electoral democracies, however, do insofar as they are necessarily incomplete democracies and imperfect states. The Zapatista rebellion in Mexico and the '60s race riots spurred on by Black radicals in the US are two obvious examples of violence used effectively as a weapon of the weak to force states to yield to subaltern demands. States and nations, we appreciate, are made from both above and below, and the constant conjunction of domination and resistance is a critical path towards genuine democratization. There is no formula for success, of course, and the path to genuine democracy is crooked.

But it is time to appreciate that non-violence does not always pay. Violence matters under certain conditions where it acquires a moral-cum-strategic relevance. These conditions are not economic, but irreducibly political. They point to essential conflicts of interest such as those between metropolitan Indian elites and rural subalterns. No amount of NREGA social audits and famine inquiry commissions can achieve what the Maoists have since 2004. Jagdalpur and Ranchi now appear clearly in everyone's radar, be it the state or civil society. All sorts of development programs and schemes are being enacted or planned, usually with considerable local input. Livelihoods are becoming more secure and sustainable. Popular mobilization is creating a shared political awareness of the rights of ordinary men and women as citizens of a democratic country, not subjects to be sacrificed at the altar of national development. Women are at the forefront of subaltern struggles to carve out a better future. Ideally, all of this could have occurred in a neat, peaceful way. But ideally, we would all be reasonable people who understood and respected each other. In that case, politics itself would not have existed since everyone would have agreed on everything. Sadly, we live in an imperfect world, so politics is inevitable and violent politics will remain an effective means to secure worthy ends.