Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State - Akhil Gupta

 “Does the ubiquity of the state make it invisible? Or is the relative lack of attention to the state in ethnographic work due to a methodology that” (Gupta, 1995, p. 211)

“privileges face-to-face contact and spatial proximity – what one may call a ‘‘physics of presence?’” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“Studying the state ethnographically involves both the analysis of the everyday practices of local bureaucracies and the discursive construction of the state in public culture” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“it allows the state to be disaggregated by focusing on different bureaucracies without prejudging their unity or coherence.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“problematize the relationship between the translocality of ‘‘the state’’ and the necessarily localized offices, institutions, and practices in which it is instantiated.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“Is it the ‘‘imperialism of categories’’ (Nandy 1990:69) that allows the particular cultural configuration of ‘‘state/civil society’’ arising from the specific historical experience of Europe to be naturalized and applied universally?” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“The discourse of corruption turns out to be a key arena through which the state, citizens, and other organizations and aggregations come to be imagined” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“Research on the state, with its focus on large-scale structures, epochal events, major policies, and ‘‘important’’ people (Evans et al. 1985; Skocpol 1979), has failed to illuminate the quotidian practices (Bourdieu 1977) of bureaucrats that tell us about the effects of the state on the everyday lives of rural people.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 212)

“I do want to question the assumption regarding the natural superiority – the assertion of authenticity – implicit in the knowledge claims generated by the fact of ‘‘being there’’ (what one may call the ‘‘ontological imperative’’). Such claims to truth gain their force precisely by clinging to bounded notions of ‘‘society’’ and ‘‘culture” (Gupta, 1995, p. 213)

“This stress on the experience of being in spatial proximity to ‘‘the other,’’ with its concomitant emphasis on sensory perception, is linked to an empiricist epistemology5 that is unable to comprehend how the state is discursively constituted” (Gupta, 1995, p. 213)

“I have looked at representations of the state and of ‘‘the public’’ in English-language and vernacular newspapers in India.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 213)

“By focusing on the discursive construction of the state, I wish to draw attention to the powerful cultural practices by which the state is symbolically represented to its employees and to citizens of the nation.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 213)

“Exploring the discursive construction of the state therefore necessarily requires attention to transnational processes in the interstate system (Calhoun 1989)” (Gupta, 1995, p. 213)

“it is that any theory of the state needs to take into account its constitution through a complex set of spatially intersecting representations and practices.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 213)

“Instead, one needs to ask how one can use the comparative study of Third World political formations to confront the ‘‘naturalness’’ of concepts that have arisen from the historical experience and cultural context of the West.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 214)

“the legacy of Western scholarship on the state has been to universalize a particular cultural construction of ‘‘state-society relations’’ in which specific notions of ‘‘statehood’’ and ‘‘civil society’’ are conjoined” (Gupta, 1995, p. 214)

“For the majority of Indian citizens, the most immediate context for encountering the state is provided by their relationships with government bureaucracies at the local level” (Gupta, 1995, p. 214)

“offices of the various government bureaucracies themselves served as sites where important information about the state was exchanged and opinions about policies or officials forged.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 214)

“The first concerns a pair of state officials, occupying lowly but important rungs in the bureaucratic hierarchy, who successfully exploit the inexperience of two rural men. The second case concerns a lower-caste man’s partially successful actions to protect himself from the threats of a powerful headman16 who has allies in the bureaucracy by appealing to a higher official. The third example draws on a series of actions conducted by the powerful Bharatiya Kisan Union (literally, Indian Peasant Union), a grassroots farmers’ movement that often strikes terror in the hearts of local state officials.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 215)

“The ‘‘practice’’ of bribe giving was not, as the young men learned, simply an economic transaction but a cultural practice that required a great degree of performative competence.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 217)

“More importantly, they were expressing frustration because they lacked the cultural capital required to negotiate deftly for those services.2” (Gupta, 1995, p. 217)

“Petty officials, however, do not always have their way. In the implementation of development programs, for example, local officials often have to seek out beneficiaries in order to meet targets set by higher authorities. The beneficiaries of these programs can then employ the authority of the upper levels of the bureaucracy to exert some pressure on local officials.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 217)

“One can also find contrasting instances where local officials are on the receiving end of villagers’ disaffection with state institutions” (Gupta, 1995, p. 219)

“lower-level officials play a crucial role in citizens’ encounters with ‘‘the state.’” (Gupta, 1995, p. 220)

“Obviously, no singular characterization of the nature and content of the interaction of villagers and bureaucrats is possible.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 220)

“it is precisely through the practices of such local institutions that a translocal institution such as the state comes to be imagined.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 220)

“The Western historical experience has been built on states that put people in locations distinct from their homes – in offices, cantonments, and courts – to mark their ‘‘rationalized’’ activity as office holders in a bureaucratic apparatus” (Gupta, 1995, p. 220)

“One has a better chance of finding them at the roadside tea stalls and in their homes than in their offices.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“if officials like Sharmaji and the village development worker are seen as thoroughly blurring the boundaries between ‘‘state’’ and ‘‘civil society,’’ it is perhaps because those categories are descriptively inadequate to the lived realities that they purport to represent.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“Second, despite the fact that lower-level officials’ earnings from bribes are substantial, it is important to locate them in a larger ‘‘system’’ of corruption in which their superior officers are firmly implicated.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“lower-level officials are only one link in a chain of corrupt practices that extends to the apex of state organizations and reaches far beyond them to electoral politics” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“Politicians raise funds through senior bureaucrats for electoral purposes, senior bureaucrats squeeze this money from their subordinates as well as directly from projects that they oversee, and subordinates follow suit” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“higher-level state officials raise large sums from the relatively few people who can afford to pay it to them, lower-level officials collect it in small figures and on a daily basis from a very large number of people” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“It is also a discursive field that enables the phenomenon to be labeled, discussed, practiced, decried, and denounced” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“Representations of the state are constituted, contested, and transformed in public culture. Public culture is a zone of cultural debate conducted through the mass media, other mechanical modes of reproduction, and the visible practices of institutions such as the state (Appadurai 1990; Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Gilroy 1987; Gurevitch et al. 1982; Hall et al. 1980; Waites et al. 1982).” (Gupta, 1995, p. 221)

“In the study of translocal phenomena such as ‘‘the state,’’ newspapers contribute to the raw material necessary for ‘‘thick’’ description.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 222)

“Since newspaper reports are invariably filed by locally resident correspondents, they constitute, as do oral interviews, a certain form of situated knowledge.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 222)

“a major discursive form through which daily life is narrativized and collectivities imagined” (Gupta, 1995, p. 222)

“the importance of all vernacular newspapers, whether regional or national dailies, lies in the fact that they carry special sections devoted to local news. These are distributed only in the region to which the news applies.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 222)

“The discourse of corruption, however, went far beyond just setting the terms of electoral competition between political parties. It not only helped to define ‘‘the political’’ but also served to constitute ‘‘the public’’ that was perceived to be reacting to corruption.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 223)

“Instead, the discourse of corruption became a means by which a fairly complex picture of the state was symbolically constructed in public culture.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 223)

“There were significant differences between the English-language magazines and newspapers mentioned above, with their urban, educated, ‘‘middle-class’’ readership, and the vernacular press. The reason lay in the structural location of the national English-language dailies within the ‘‘core’’ regions – the urban centers of capital, high politics, administration, and education.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 223)

“The vernacular newspapers maintained a richer sense of the multilayered nature of the state because their reportage was necessarily focused on events in different localities, which corresponded to lower levels of the state hierarchy.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“The vernacular press therefore particularly clearly delineated the multilayered and pluricentric nature of ‘‘the state.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“the ‘‘national’’ Hindi dailies such as the Navbharat Times, much less prone to reify the state as a monolithic organization with a single chain of command” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“They made a practice of explicitly naming specific departments of the state bureaucracy. The vernacular press also seemed to pursue stories of corruption with greater zeal than its metropolitan counterpart.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“They also documented in great detail exactly what these corrupt practices were.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“First, state officials higher up the hierarchy were often depicted as completely unresponsive to complaints and even as complicit with the corrupt practices” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“In all cases, the function of the press appeared to be that of creating a space in which the grievances of the masses could be aired and the common good (janhit) pursued” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“The state constructed here was one that consisted of widely disparate institutions with little or no coordination among them, of multiple levels of authority, none of which were accountable to ordinary people, and employees (secure in the knowledge that they could not be fired) who treated citizens with contempt.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“At the same time, these reports also created subjects41 who were represented as being exploited, powerless, and outraged.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 224)

“First, if one looks at newspapers from different regions of Uttar Pradesh, and published in other languages (for example, Urdu), wide variations are to be found within the vernacular press.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“Second, the mass media is not the only important source for the circulation of representations of ‘‘the state’’ in public culture. Police and administration officials repeatedly voice their frustration at their inability to counter ‘‘wild stories’’ and ‘‘rumors’’ that contest and contradict the official version of events.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“Unlike other technologies of communication such as newspapers, radio, and television, rumor cannot be controlled by simply clamping down on the source of production (Coombe 1993)” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“The other face of a discourse of corruption, therefore, is a discourse of accountability.45 Herzfeld puts the emphasis in the right place when he says that ‘‘accountability is a socially produced, culturally saturated amalgam of ideas about person, presence, and polity. . . [whose] meaning is culturally specific . . . [and whose] management of personal or collective identity cannot break free of social experience’’ (1992a:47)” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“Expectations of ‘‘right’’ behavior, standards of accountability, and norms of conduct for state officials, in other words, come from social groups as well as from ‘‘the state.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“Sometimes these standards and norms converge; more often, they do not. Thus, there are always divergent and conflicting assessments of whether a particular course of action is ‘‘corrupt.’” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“Subjects’ deployment of discourses of corruption are necessarily mediated by their structural location (this point is developed further below). But state officials are also multiply positioned within different regimes of power: in consequence, they simultaneously employ, and are subject to, quite varying discourses of accountability.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“Actions tolerated or considered legitimate under colonial rule may be classified as ‘‘corrupt’’ by the rule-making apparatuses of the independent nation-state because an electoral democracy is deemed accountable to ‘‘the people.’” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“The sense of pervasive corruption in a country such as India might then itself be a consequence of the changes in the discourse of accountability promulgated by postcolonial nationalists” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“significant changes during the postcolonial period have arisen from the pressures of electoral politics (as evidenced by the Bofors controversy) and from peasant mobilization.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 225)

“nationalist as opposed to colonial regimes seek the kind of popular legitimacy that will enable them to act in the name of ‘‘the people.’’ They thus place new responsibilities on state employees and vest new rights in subjects who are then constituted as citizens. The postcolonial state consciously sets out to create subject positions unknown during the colonial era: ‘‘citizenship’’ does not just mark inclusiveness in a territorial domain but indicates a set of rights theoretically invested in subjects who inhabit the nation.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 226)

“The discourse of corruption, by marking those actions that constitute an infringement of such rights, thus acts to represent the rights of citizens to themselves.48” (Gupta, 1995, p. 226)

“The landowning castes in this region have become fairly prosperous as they have been the chief beneficiaries of the green revolution. But this newfound wealth has yet to be translated into bureaucratic power and cultural capital. In other words, given the central role that state institutions play in rural life, these groups seek to stabilize the conditions for the reproduction of their dominance. Because they perceive the state to be acting against their interests, they deploy the discourse of corruption to undermine the credibility of the state and to attack the manner in which government organizations operate.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 226)

“The state itself and whatever is construed to stand apart from it community, polity, society, civil society (Kligman 1990), political society – are all culturally constructed in specific ideological fields.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 226)

“It is hence imperative that we constantly contextualize the construction of the state within particular historical and cultural conjunctures.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 226)

“Together, they enable a certain construction of the state that meshes the imagined translocal institution with its localized embodiments.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 226)

“The government, in other words, is being constructed here in the imagination and everyday practices of ordinary people” (Gupta, 1995, p. 227)

“Of course, this is exactly what ‘‘corporate culture’’ and nationalism do: they make possible and then naturalize the construction of such nonlocalizable institutions.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 227)

“one must grasp the pivotal role of public culture, which represents one of the most important modalities for the discursive construction of ‘‘the state.’’ Obviously, not everyone imagines the state in quite the same manner.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 227)

“relationship between diversely located groups of people and their employment of the different media of representation and of varying resources of cultural capital in imagining ‘‘the state.’” (Gupta, 1995, p. 227)

“When a complaint of corruption is lodged against a local official, the investigation is always conducted by an official of a higher rank. Higher officials are thus seen as providing redressals for grievances and punishing local officials for corrupt behavior.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“all constructions of the state have to be situated with respect to the location of the speaker” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“how clearly he understands its composition as an entity with multiple layers and diverse locales and centers” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“Ram Singh maintains a distinction between the regime and the bureaucracy. He sees the regime’s good intentions toward the lower castes being frustrated by venal state officials” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“Ram Singh reproduces an apologetics for the failure of policy (the formulation is all right, it is the implementors that are to blame) pervasively found in India’s ‘‘middle classes,’’ delivered by politicians belonging to the regime in power, and reproduced in the work of academics, higher bureaucrats, and sympathetic officials of international agencies” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“his nuanced description of the state as a disaggregated and multilayered institution, his analysis closely parallels a discourse on the state that is disseminated by the mass media and is therefore translocal” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“Obviously, it was not just the country that was being imagined on television through the representation of its different parts but also the national state through the image of ‘‘its’’ leader” (Gupta, 1995, p. 228)

“articulation between (necessarily fractured) hegemonic discourses and the inevitably situated and interested interpretations of subaltern subjects.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 229)

“he is clearly drawing on a mass-mediated knowledge of what that upper-level of government comprises, who the agents responsible for its actions are, and what kinds of policies and programs they are promoting.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 229)

“There is obviously no Archimedean point from which to visualize ‘‘the state,’’ only numerous situated knowledges (Haraway 1988).” (Gupta, 1995, p. 229)

“It is therefore important to situate a certain symbolic construction of the state with respect to the particular context in which it is realized.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 229)

“The importance of the mass media should not blind us to the differences that exist in the way that diversely situated people imagine the state.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 229)

“The first problem has to do with the reification inherent in unitary descriptions of ‘‘the state.’’63 When one analyzes the manner in which villagers and officials encounter the state, it becomes clear that it must be conceptualized in terms far more decentralized and disaggregated than has been the case so far.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 229)

“The second major problem addressed in this article concerns the translocality of state” institutions” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“conceptualize a space that is constituted by the intersection of local, regional, national, and transnational phenomena. Accordingly, I have stressed the role of public culture in the discursive construction of the state.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“The third important argument advanced in this article, also tied to the significance of public culture for an analysis of the state, has to do with the discursive construction of the state.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“Foregrounding the question of representation allows us to see the modalities by which the state comes to be imagined. The discourse of corruption and accountability together constitute one mechanism through which the Indian state came to be discursively constructed in public culture” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“In order that a state may legitimately represent a nation in the international system of nation-states, it has to conform at least minimally to the requirements of a modern nation-state. The tension between legitimacy in the interstate system and autonomy and sovereignty is intensifying for nation-states with the continued movement toward an increasingly transnational public sphere.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“complex cultural and ideological interconnections reveal that discourses of corruption (and hence of accountability) are from the very beginning articulated in a field formed by the intersection of many different transnational forces” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“to understand how discourses of corruption symbolically construct ‘‘the state,’’ we must inspect phenomena whose boundaries do not coincide with those of the nationstate. At the same time, however, these discourses do not operate homogeneously across the world.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“Rather, they articulate with distinctive historical trajectories to form unique hybridizations and creolizations in different settings (Gupta and Ferguson 1992).” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“The fourth significant point, which attends to the historical and cultural specificity of constructions of the state, has to do with vigilance toward the imperialism of the Western conceptual apparatus” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“Looking at everyday practices, including practices of representation, and the representations of (state) practice in public culture helps us arrive at a historically specific and ideologically constructed understanding of ‘‘the state.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“Such an analysis simultaneously considers those other groupings and institutions that are imagined in the processes of contestation, negotiation, and collaboration with ‘‘the state” (Gupta, 1995, p. 230)

“The final question that this article addresses concerns political action and activism, concerns that should be included in the field of applied anthropology. In the context of the state, the collaboration/resistance dichotomy is unhelpful in thinking of strategies for political struggle.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“does not allow one to take advantage of the fact that the state is a formation that, as Stuart Hall puts it, ‘‘condenses’’ contradictions (Hall 1981, 1986a, 1986b).” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“It also hides from view the fact that there is no position strictly outside or inside the state because what is being contested is the terrain of the ideological field.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“What is at stake is nothing less than a transformation in the manner in which the state comes to be constructed.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“By pointing out that advocates of applied work and those who favor activist intervention may sometimes unintentionally share a common project of reifying ‘‘the state’’ and then locating themselves with respect to that totality (the one inside, the other outside)” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“These contradictions not only address the divergent pulls exerted by the multiple agencies, departments, organizations, levels, and agendas of ‘‘the state’’ but also the contested terrain of public representation” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“draw an initial distinction between entitlement and empowerment.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“The ‘‘machinery’’ of development, with its elaborate yet repetitive logic, focuses on the goal of delivering entitlements.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“And it is here that seizing on the fissures and ruptures, the contradictions in the policies, programs, institutions, and discourses of ‘‘the state’’ allows people to create possibilities for political action and activism.” (Gupta, 1995, p. 231)

“Arturo Escobar (1992) has felicitously put it, alternatives to development, and not development alternatives” (Gupta, 1995, p. 232)