INDIA IN TRANSITION. Anti-graft agitations and the sarkar

From early 2011 to the end of 2012, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faced its biggest civic challenge in the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement.

This agitation came to a crescendo off the back of a sequence of high-profile corruption scandals involving senior government officials. The UPA, after a successful re-election in 2009, found itself in the midst of a credibility and corruption crisis. Fast forward to the smouldering summer of 2013 and citizens’ cry across developing world democracies raised the global volume for nationwide agitations using the language of anti-corruption. Ensuing reactions saw some democracies, such as Turkey, crush the groundswell while others, such as Brazil, were more conciliatory.

Corruption has, once again, struck the imagination of citizens and scholars alike. The phenomenon subverts elections, state mechanisms of representation and accountability, and it undermines the public’s trust in institutions, thus leading to public unrest. My recent research tackles a key part of this state-society relation that has received little, explicit attention: Why do some governments respond more tolerantly than others to anti-corruption agitation?

To answer this puzzle, I examine the cases of the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government’s brutal suppression of the Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) movement; and the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government’s tolerant response toward the IAC agitation. I will mainly discuss the UPA response. The short answer is that the presence or absence of ideological checks and balances among decision-making elites in government determines tolerant or intolerant behaviour.

The claim that ideologically plural governments are more tolerant is not new. Movements that are explicitly or implicitly anti-corruption take shape in an environment where government corruption has been exposed — through scandals or judicial investigations. This heightens the sense of insecurity within government and lowers their credibility in the eyes of the electorate. Consequently, re-establishing government credibility becomes a key goal for the decision-makers in their response to the movement.

My research shows that different decision-making elites accepted, appropriated, deployed, and contested different combinations of ideas around the political economy of India as well as competing nationalisms to explain and resolve the crisis of corruption and the nationwide IAC. These divergent prescriptions and strategies are intimately tied to the decision-makers’ professional backgrounds.

Ideological diversity in a coalition government is tied to political parties, as in the case of the UPA, but it is also anchored to the proponents of new policy frameworks in government, chiefly technocrats. One group of technocrats in the UPA entered the Indian government in the late 1980s and 1990s when coalitions first emerged, and when the nation’s main economic architecture was being reformed through liberalisation reforms.

These decision-makers then took up positions of power in Manmohan Singh’s government as members of the Cabinet, Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and senior bureaucracy, not least the Prime Minister himself.

Another set of technocrats and activists who, as part of the right to information movements (RTI) of the 1990s and early 2000s became the vanguard for renewed nationwide civic activism, went on to take up positions of power in the UPA government as members of the Congress Party President’s parallel cabinet, the National Advisory Council (NAC) as well as senior officials within the bureaucracy. These technocrats act as idea “carriers” – individuals reliably known to hold a given set of ideas who move into decision-making institutions and positions of authority over government action.

Three dominant perspectives permeated decision-making institutions in the UPA vis-à-vis the IAC: pro-Capitalist, pro-Statist, and Secular-Nationalist.

Pro-capitalists are mainly technocrats and senior bureaucrats who pursued limited engagement with the IAC, believing that the movement sought to discredit the government by conflating economic growth mechanisms with corruption.

Pro-Statists are mainly technocrats and activists with a position in government who viewed the IAC in sympathetic terms and sought full engagement with the movement. The IAC, for these elites, represented a set of citizens acting against widespread corruption that stemmed from the very mechanisms of economic liberalisation.

Secular-Nationalists are mainly Congress party career politicians who viewed the IAC in hostile terms as a movement that represented the groundswell of religious nationalism backed by the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). These ideas shaped government institutions’ separate strategies pertaining to the IAC that, on aggregate, made an arbitrary response to the agitation less likely and increased the likelihood of government tolerance. Elite ideas, thus, acted as a checks and balance on government action.

Government response to a nationwide anti-corruption movement is determined by the absence or presence of an ideologically-plural central government. If the ruling government has an electoral majority and decision-makers therein possess a singular, dominant ideology then the government is more likely to behave intolerantly toward agitations.

For example, during the anti-corruption JP movement 1974-75, Indira Gandhi and other decision-making elites in authoritative positions of power viewed the agitation in hostile terms. My research, built on unexamined letters and documents from the period, illustrates that this perspective was rooted in Congress party ideology surrounding the “unity in diversity” conception of the nation, which clashed with government elites’ perception of the agitation as a front for religious-nationalism. The centralisation of this party ideology in the hands of a few, disparate elites, led by Mrs Gandhi, and further weakened by the absence of technocrats within decision-making, made a brutal and suppressive response toward the JP movement more likely.

In contrast, the separation of powers between different parties and institutions within the UPA coalition government created institutional constraints that made intolerant government action less likely. The causal foundations of this set-up, I argue, were divergent ideas. Ultimately, therefore, why decision-makers pick one course of action over another may well be shaped by external factors such as rent-seeking, bribe-taking, electoral determinants, and international pressure. My research highlights the role of endogenous factors — how decision-makers function where political power is fluid and fought over through a constellation of ideas.

Bilal Baloch is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Oxford.This article is by special arrangement with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania