Most of the stadiums put up in Delhi for last autumn’s Commonwealth Games have already fallen into disrepair. Built at huge cost, and in some cases after thousands of slum-dwellers were turfed out, they stand as a leaking monument to what many now see as the self-serving nature of the nation’s political class. Many Indians, and especially the professionals who make up most of the country’s tiny income tax base, have had enough.
This is why Anna Hazare, the veteran activist who has been on hunger strike to demand a draconian set of anti-corruption measures, is winning such astonishing support. The games were but one example of corruption on such a scale as to make irrefutable what most have long assumed: public infrastructure is normally only an incidental byproduct of the real business of Indian politics, which is business.
Mr Hazare’s fearlessness, his Gandhian tactics and his attempts to distance his campaign from entrenched political interests, fill many with a hope that honesty can return to public life. Yet the impulse behind these protests is not necessarily generous or gentle. The Indian middle classes want to seize back what they consider to have been taken from them. Sceptics also rightly note an authoritarianism lurking behind the movement – for Mr Hazare is also a self-righteous figure who believes in the most violent kinds of punishment for those who betray his vision.
After independence in 1947 the close regulation of money, property and business during four decades of centralised planning opened up innumerable possibilities for corrupt earnings. Fortunes were accumulated to be spent on property – in India and elsewhere – or stored abroad.
The globalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s only expanded the opportunities for this corrupt, and often formidable, entrepreneurial class. “Big-ticket” deals multiplied, much as they did in Russia during the same period: businesses became involved in a scramble for the ownership of basic resources previously controlled by the state – land, mines, oil, mobile telephony spectrums etc – and this only the political class could endow.
During the stagnant years it was natural to take money out of the country. But as the boom took off the incentives switched. Rich politicians became investors, “cleaning” their money abroad and bringing it back again as “foreign” direct investment. A surprising amount of the new landscape of Indian cities – international hotels, shopping malls, global retail brands – arose from this kind of capital. The middle-class rage we see today is directed against the rising fortunes of just this sort of activity – and it is anger that is both genuine and widespread. Those who bought into the Nehruvian socialist dream after independence – those teachers and public servants who believed in frugality, honesty, hard work and nationalism – saw others riding roughshod over those values and growing in wealth, prestige and self-satisfaction.
This feeling has only increased in the current era: taxpaying professionals working 70-hour weeks now compete unhappily for urban space with massively wealthier and more powerful businessmen and bureaucrats whose sources of wealth are opaque and, on the face of it at least, too effortlessly acquired.
There can be little doubt that this type of corruption will endure for a long time. Indeed, the word itself is inadequate to describe the highly complex – and often highly effective – network of relationships that links India’s top businessmen and bureaucrats. To see this merely as a means for greedy politicians to enrich themselves would be to underestimate its significance. Instead it has become an important engine for the rapid delivery of capital into a political system that is in other ways inimical to speed. Displacing such a formidable machine will be extremely difficult.
Only in bad times would a movement such as Mr Hazare’s elicit such widespread and emotional allegiance. But from the point of view of several hundred million Indians who are tired of watching a corrupt, swaggering political class taking the best for itself, these are very bad times indeed.
By Rana Dasgupta