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Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossessionand Corruption Narratives in Urban India

Sapana Doshi & Malini Ranganathan

To cite this article: Sapana Doshi & Malini Ranganathan (2017) Contesting the Unethical City:Land Dispossession and Corruption Narratives in Urban India, Annals of the American Associationof Geographers, 107:1, 183-199, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1226124

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1226124

Published online: 11 Oct 2016.

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Contesting the Unethical City: Land Dispossessionand Corruption Narratives in Urban India

Sapana Doshi* and Malini Ranganathany

*School of Geography and Development, University of ArizonaySchool of International Service, American University

In this age of global inequality, how people talk of corruptionmatters. This article examines the role of corruption narra-tives in struggles against land enclosures (“land grabs”) in two Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic research on landgrabs in Mumbai and Bangalore and critical corruption and geography literatures, we argue that corruption talk byslum-based and lower middle-class residents and activists advances an ethical critique of contemporary capitalism. Inour cases, corruption discourse upends mainstream development agendas that narrowly equate corruption with individ-ual acts of bribery and the long-standing notion in India that corruption manifests mainly among the poor and lowerrungs of the state. Instead, we find that “corruption” serves as a cultural, semantic, and moral rubric that expresses andshapes a sense of structural injustice in thismoment of sharpening urban inequality. Specifically, corruption talk is lever-aged to identify and challenge the mechanisms underlying elite land grabs and the hypocritical policing of the poor.Corruption discourse also provides a meaningful framework to voice discontent over the betrayal of the “public inter-est”—defined here as housing and economic dispossession. Taking care not to unequivocally celebrate its progressivepotential, we find that corruption discourse can be and has been repurposed in disruptive ways. We therefore posit theneed to examine how corruption politics are expanding—rather than disappearing—from geographies of advancedcapitalism.KeyWords: accumulation by dispossession, corruption discourse, informality, land struggles, postcolonial urbanism.

在全球不均的当前时代中, 人们如何讨论贪腐将具有影响力。本文检视在印度两个城市中, 贪腐论述在对抗圈地 (“土地掠夺”)中所扮演的角色。我们运用在孟买及孟加拉对土地掠夺进行的民族志研究,主张居住在贫民窟以及中下阶层的居民和行动者们有关贪腐的话语, 推进了对于当代资本主义的道德批判。在我们的案例中, 贪腐论述倒置将贪腐限缩并等同于个人贪污行为的主流发展议程, 以及贪腐主要盛行于国家内部穷困和较为低阶社会此一长期存在于印度之概念。反之, 我们发现, “贪腐” 在城市不均更为尖锐化的当下, 提供作为表达和形塑结构不平等的感觉之文化、语意及道德成规。贪腐论述尤其在指认并挑战支撑精英土地掠夺以及对穷人进行虚伪的警备之机制中发挥关键作用。贪腐论

述同时提供了具有意义的架构, 对背叛 “公共利益” 的不满进行发声—于此定义为住居和经济的夺取。为了避免毫不迟疑地颂扬该论述的激进潜能, 我们同时发现贪腐论述可能、且已经以破坏的方式进行再目的化。我们因此提出检视贪腐政治如何在发达资本主义的地理中扩张—而非从中消失的方

式。关键词：夺取式积累, 贪腐论述, 非正式性, 土地争夺, 后殖民城市主义。

En esta edad de desigualdad global, es importante la manera como la gente habla de la corrupci�on. Este art�ıculo exam-ina el papel de las narrativas sobre corrupci�on en las luchas contra los encierros de tierra (“segregaci�on de terrenos”)en dos ciudades de la India. Bas�andonos en investigaci�on etnogr�afica sobre terrenos segregados de Mumbai y Banga-lore, lo mismo que en literaturas de la cr�ıtica de la corrupci�on y la geograf�ıa, sostenemos que las charlas de residentessobre corrupci�on, tanto en zonas de tugurios como de clase media baja y con activistas, fomentan una cr�ıtica �etica delcapitalismo contempor�aneo. En nuestros casos, el discurso sobre la corrupci�on transforma dr�asticamente las agendasde la corriente principal del desarrollo, que estrechamente iguala la corrupci�on con actos individuales de soborno, y lanoci�on de vieja data en la India que asume que la corrupci�on se manifiesta principalmente entre los pobres y en losniveles m�as bajos del Estado. En vez de eso, hallamos que la “corrupci�on” sirve como una r�ubrica cultural, sem�antica ymoral que expresa y configura un sentido de injusticia estructural en este momento de aguda desigualdad urbana.Espec�ıficamente, la charla sobre la corrupci�on se utiliza para identificar y retar los mecanismos que est�an detr�as de lassegregaciones de terrenos de la �elite y el hip�ocrita control polic�ıaco de los pobres. El discurso sobre la corrupci�ontambi�en provee un marco significativo para propalar el descontento sobre la traici�on del “inter�es p�ublico”—que aqu�ıse define como el desposeimiento habitacional y econ�omico. Teniendo el cuidado de no celebrar demasiado ine-qu�ıvocamente su potencial progresivo, encontramos que el discurso sobre corrupci�on puede ser y ha sido replanteadode maneras perturbadoras. Por eso nosotros destacamos la necesidad de examinar el modo como las pol�ıticas corruptasest�an extendi�endose—en vez de retroceder—desde las geograf�ıas del capitalismo avanzado. Palabras clave: acumulaci�onpor desposeimiento, discurso sobre la corrupci�on, informalidad, luchas por la tierra, urbanismo poscolonial.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(1) 2017, pp. 183–199 � 2017 by American Association of GeographersInitial submission, February 2016; revised submission, June 2016; final acceptance, July 2016

Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

Sitting in a shaded nook between the broken wallsof his demolished neighborhood, activist-resi-dent Devasadhan Nair shuffles through binders

and piles of documents strewn across a concrete slab.His fingers scroll down a long list of forged signaturesin a document prepared by developers as proof of slumresidents’ consent for a project to clear the area forcommercial high rises. He stops at one name. “Thislady Sulochna B. Pawar died in 2005. How did theyget her signature [at a 2009 meeting]?” The scene isfrom a campaign video expos�e of a fraudulent, state-enforced land acquisition for a slum redevelopmentproject in Golibar, a settlement located in the bullishreal estate market of central Mumbai. Nair and hisneighbors have been contesting corrupt land grabs andforced evictions since 2010.

Such conflicts in Mumbai are part of a transnationalcurrent. From everyday frustrations to mass protests,“corruption” is the name given to what many around theworld see as an increasingly inequitable and unethicalpolitical–economic order. Going beyond bribery, recentanticorruption mobilizations express discontent overextreme inequality, authoritarianism, and a host ofwealth-usurping collusions between states and elites. InCairo, for instance, “No to corruption, no to this regime!”was the rallying slogan that inspired thousands to descendon Tahrir Square to topple Egypt’s dictatorship(Gumbiner, Abouali, and Colla 2012). In India, high-level scandals implicating officials and corporate headshelped galvanize a national anticorruption movement,dramatically shifting electoral results and fueling the for-mation of an influential new political party. Meanwhile,public sector kickbacks in postbailout Greece (Smith2014), money laundering through property transactionsinNew York (Story and Saul 2015), and the nefarious taxevasions exposed by the Panama Papers have captivatedpublic imaginaries across theGlobal North as well.

This article explores the relationship between cor-ruption talk and the lived geographies of advancedcapitalism. Rather than a priori defining acts of corrup-tion—which vary in meaning across cultural contextsand historical eras—we follow a number of criticalscholars who study shifting and situated discourses ofcorruption as a lens into contemporary political life(e.g., Gupta 1995; Haller and Shore 2005; Jeffrey andYoung 2014). We insist that “corruption” is bestunderstood as a malleable and morally charged discur-sive field that does different kinds of political work atdistinct conjunctural moments. In contemporaryIndia, the interconnected processes of informal urbani-zation and rapid land-based development and

dispossession play a critical role in the articulation ofrecent anticorruption struggles.

Drawing on ethnographies of land struggles in Mum-bai and Bangalore and critical literatures on corruptionand postcolonial urban geography, we argue that cor-ruption talk by lower class residents advances an ethicalcritique of accumulation and dispossession. Specifi-cally, we find that contemporary anticorruption narra-tives provide a cultural, semantic, and moral rubric tochallenge the legally nebulous processes through whichland is appropriated by elites and the poor are concomi-tantly dispossessed. Furthermore, corruption provides ameaningful framework to voice discontent over thebetrayal of the “public interest.” As one anticorruptionactivist summarized it, “The basic point is that corrup-tion is this: Land which has to be used for public pur-poses and for poor people has been grabbed by powerfulpeople. This is wrong. This is corruption.” Such narra-tives reveal much about how polarizing sociospatialtransformations are advanced, narrated, and contested.

Bangalore and Mumbai are paradigmatic sites tostudy the interface of corruption talk with land strug-gles because of a flurry of conflicts over state-facilitatedland acquisitions for “world city” development proj-ects. Whereas Mumbai, slated as India’s finance capi-tal, exemplifies inner-city redevelopment in slums1

and former industrial areas and exemplifies diverseslum-based mobilizations, Bangalore, with its morerecent technology-driven growth, concentrates devel-opment for real estate and high-technology projectson the urban fringe and exemplifies lower middle-classmobilizations. We find that corruption is now beingmobilized across class positionalities in both cities asan ethical critique of land-based accumulation and dis-possession, processes that lie at the heart of urbanizedcapitalist development in India today.

Our approach stems from ongoing ethnographicresearch on various aspects of urban transformation,informality, and social mobilization in Mumbai andBangalore over the last decade. Whereas the firstauthor has focused on slum redevelopment and resettle-ment in Mumbai, the second author has studied thepolitics of informal development and infrastructure atBangalore’s periphery. Recently we launched a jointresearch project investigating how changing tropes of“corruption” narrate land enclosures and dispossession.We used qualitative and ethnographic methods includ-ing participant observation at social movement events;unstructured interviews with residents, activists, andpoliticians; and analysis of newspaper articles, officialreports, and activist publications and blogs.

184 Doshi and Ranganathan

Methodologically and theoretically, our objective isto think about corruption with our informants (forwhom we use pseudonyms here unless they are publicfigures)—to rely on the insights of spoken and writtenlanguage. What does it mean, as Rekha, one Banga-lore-based activist defined it, when corruption isreframed as a “collusion, or a nexus, an establishednetwork that works at a permanent level” and not a“one-time deal” wherein “someone is giving themoney and someone is receiving the money”? Why isit that activists are contending at this moment thatcorruption is ill-defined and that many acts not for-mally codified as such are, in fact, corruption? Dis-course and meaning making are crucial to our analysisbecause urban residents affected by land grabs vocalizecorruption in sometimes counterintuitive ways tochallenge land-related collusions as immoral or“criminal,” yet not always “illegal.” Their stories upendmainstream approaches to corruption focused narrowlyon the illegality of individual behaviors and reflect awidespread distrust of big money. They also reveal thesalience of informality, not just as a legal status but asa power-laden, deregulated, and flexible modality ofurban land use and governance (Roy 2009). One ofour key contributions is thus to demonstrate that thepolitics of urban land informality play a critical role indispossession and anticorruption mobilizations.

The following section of the article aims to rethinkcorruption by engaging with geographic and postcolo-nial scholarship on dispossession and informality. Wethen draw on our qualitative data to demonstrate howcorruption takes on semantic force in the context ofrapid high-end development. One section delves intohow public discontent constitutes “a structure of feel-ing” (Williams 1977) surrounding the practices andbiases of land enclosure, and the next focuses on howdispossession and the betrayal of the public interestare contested through moral idioms deployed by bothslum dwellers and middle-class residents and activists.We conclude by reviewing our main findings, discus-sing the limits and potentialities of corruption talk forsocial justice in India, and illuminating the insights ofthis research for bolstering critical geographies of cor-ruption beyond our case cities.

Rethinking Corruption Through CriticalTheories of Dispossession and Informality

Since the end of the Cold War, political scientistsand economists have been at the helm of defining,

measuring, and rooting out corruption. In the 1990s,anticorruption became a centerpiece of the WorldBank’s structural reforms and was eventually defined as“the abuse of public office for private gain” (WorldBank 1997, 8). This definition represented a main-stream “consensus” on corruption (Johnston 2005),one that effectively foreclosed reflection on other typesof corruption (e.g., private-sector corruption, transna-tional corruption, legal corruption, etc.). Deployingrational choice models, this view reduced corruption tothe principal-agent problem or what anthropologistsHaller and Shore (2005) dubbed the “rotten apple”interpretation. If state actors are corrupt, it is the resultof internal dysfunction and individual venality—con-ditions considered endemic to third world states andthe “traditional” societies in which they are embed-ded—rather than systemic extractive relationships.Corruption, so the logic went, could only be remediedthrough liberalization, deregulation, and an overallminimization of the state’s role in the economy. Thisconsensus not only uncritically pathologized non-Western governments but also problematically mir-rored and reinforced neoliberal doctrines that assumemarkets to be the antidote to undisciplined states (seealso Brown and Cloke 2004; Hindess 2005; Wedel2012).

As Jenkins (2014) documented, talk of corrup-tion in India has a long career, and its varied usesin political rhetoric are marked by key political–economic turning points. For instance, by the mid-1970s when the shortcomings of the Nehruvianstate-led development model (in which the stateoften accommodated the interests of industrial capi-tal) had become apparent, politicians began toleverage the discourse of corruption to call atten-tion to corruption in “high places” (Jenkins 2014,44). These older Gandhian understandings viewedwealth accumulation as inherently exploitative and“the capitalist system itself as corrupt” (Jenkins2014, 43, italics added). This view of corruption,however, eventually gave way to market rhetoric.In the late 1980s, when proliberalization politicianssought to free the business class from the shacklesof bureaucratic red tape, a dominant understandingof massive corruption at the bottom took hold inIndia. This was a view that no doubt gained trac-tion because of a long-standing cultural tendencyin the country for upper classes and castes to framelower classes and castes as inherently “corrupt” and“criminal” (Witsoe 2011). Bjorkman (2014), forinstance, found that middle-class discourses in

Contesting the Unethical City 185

contemporary India increasingly decry “the declineof democracy, the corruption and criminalization ofpolitics, and the sorry state of government proppedup by the shortsighted whims of the slum-dwellingmasses” (617). It is not surprising, then, that eliteanticorruption campaigns over the last decade havetargeted lower level politicians and officials in linewith the consensus view (Jenkins 2014).

In contrast, critical ethnographic literature hasshown corruption to be situated and shifting, shapedindelibly by the positionality of the onlooker.Although careful not to resort to cultural relativism,2

scholars in this tradition have argued that corruptionis embedded in governing processes of the postcolonythat blur the boundaries between state and society(Gupta 1995). Colonial and postcolonial spaces havealways been ruled and lived through mixes of legal andextralegal authorities—activities that fall under a“corruption complex” (de Sardaan 1999)—and thenegotiation of different layers of indigenous, colonial,and postcolonial rule (Mamdani 1996). Ethnographersof corruption have thus highlighted how corruptionpractice and talk are anchored in everyday life. In crit-ical geographic accounts, corruption is framed in insti-tutional terms with uneven impacts across gender,class, and caste (Robbins 2000). Jeffrey’s (2002, 2010)research in northern India reveals how anticorruptionidioms serve to entrench the power of richer farmerswho continue to perpetuate illicit acts to maintainmarket advantages over the poor. Negotiationsbetween layers of the state and across multiple social“fields” (arenas in which differently situated classesstruggle in pursuit of particular gains; Jeffrey 2010)have long enabled postcolonial subjects to simulta-neously celebrate, condemn, and banalize corruption,reinforcing the fact that corruption is a situated con-struct that can serve multiple functions.

Although we concur that ethnography moves usbeyond the problems of fixing corruption a priori, wealso find it necessary to bridge with critical geographicconcerns over resource usurpations—that is, to situateethnographic approaches in contemporary political-economic processes, particularly land dispossession.Although less visible in the critical corruption litera-ture, we find that notions of primitive accumulation—the process of enclosing and appropriating land andresources that inaugurates exploitative capitalist mar-kets—are indispensable to theorizing corruption. Inthe Marxist view, corruption operates not as an aberra-tion but is foundational to modern capitalism. Mostfamously, Harvey’s theory of accumulation by

dispossession reworks primitive accumulation to speakto Luxemburg’s thesis that capitalism is reproducedthrough ongoing extraeconomic (nonmarket) wealth,land, and resource transfers—often through the use of“force, fraud, oppression, looting” (cited in Harvey2003, 137).3

The linkage between corruption and dispossession isespecially pertinent in Indian cities today where theinstitutionalization of secure private property (a keydriver of urban wealth) relies on informal, hybrid log-ics of rule. Much like in rural areas, urban areas inIndia have long been governed via a dialectic of ratio-nal planning and disorderly, informal urbanism. Thisdialectic originated in racialized colonial planning, ageneral feature of colonial cities (King 1990). Forexample, despite founding differences—Bombay(Mumbai) was a major port city and Bangalore a mili-tary cantonment—both cities were racially and socio-spatially segregated under British rule. Servicedadministrative and residential areas, known as “whitetowns,” constituted the exclusive space of the whiteelite who were set apart from native “black towns.”Entire cities were carved up and enclosed as propertyfor Europeans and a few native elites.

Postindependence, these inequalities were deep-ened by agrarian modernization efforts and market-ori-ented restructuring. Migrants flocked to cities insearch of livelihoods. In Mumbai, this meant that suc-cessive waves of informal settlements—known by thecatch-all term slum—emerged to cater to the workingclass, rural migrants, and refugees. In Bangalore, popu-lation growth was slow until the advent of technology-driven liberalization at the end of the 1980s, whichsignificantly ushered in unauthorized settlement at theperipheries. City plans for low-income housing andservices in Indian cities since independence haveremained at the level of technomanagerial discourse.Informality has thus become the de facto modalitythrough which affordable housing, services, and liveli-hoods are met despite India’s postindependence social-ist development regime (Chatterjee 2004; Gidwani2015). Thus the everyday survival of the lower classesis marked by informal practices that are denounced byupper classes as “corrupt” or illegal.

At the same time, critical interventions demon-strate that informality is not simply practiced by thepoor, nor does it sit outside of legal–rational domainsof government and market exchange (AlSayyad andRoy 2004). Government authorities might directlyparticipate in informality (Roy 2009). If private prop-erty regimes were established through formal legal


processes under colonialism, it is the dynamics ofinformality that facilitate today’s legally questionableurban enclosures—begging conceptual linkages amongcorruption, dispossession, and informality. Real estatehas become the frontier of wealth accumulation inIndia (Chakravorty 2013; Searle 2016). Since the1990s, malls, luxury residences, and office complexeshave been informally developed through spaces of par-ticipation and influence and aesthetic justifications,and slums have been criminalized and removed(Ghertner 2015). In both Mumbai (Weinstein 2008)and Bangalore (Goldman 2011), it is an open secretthat developers and officials work hand in hand withorganized crime syndicates for speculative high-endreal estate projects. Flexible planning, as Gururani(2013) put it, “is not a random act but has a culturallogic that offers access to material and discursivemaneuvers of state power, legal and extralegal net-works, and relations of influence” (121). In short,attention to informality reveals how states engage inspatial practices to the benefit of some in ways that tra-verse boundaries of legality and illegality.

Although the relationship between informality andcorruption is complex and slippery, there are compel-ling reasons to bring these constructs into conversa-tion. Informality captures a range of processessurrounding the governance, transfer, and (re)use ofland across class, and corruption serves as an ethicaldiscourse invoked at punctuated moments to assess thelegitimacy and stakes of informal practices. Corruptionis a cultural field saturated with particular vernacularvocabularies and affective sensibilities that allow ordi-nary people to understand the contradictions shroud-ing (in)formal rule at particular moments.

We thus find it useful to think of corruption talk interms of what Williams (1977) called a “structure offeeling” (35) or a system of word associations, mean-ings, and values that emerge at a particular junctures.Structures of feeling are “meanings and values as theyare actively lived and felt” (132). We demonstrate howin a moment of acute wealth concentration and anurban real estate bonanza, new linguistic associationshave been forged that connect corruption with landgrab, reflecting a shared sense of distrust and moral rep-robation across class groups. In our cases a range of (in)formal modalities of governing and enclosing land havecome under attack for privileging outrageous profits forthe few at the expense of the broader public. As weshow later, such processes have contributed to new ter-rains of struggle that have given “corruption” newmeaning and political force in the present.

Narrating Land Grab “Scandals” ThroughCorruption Talk

In the following sections, we draw on ethnographicand archival data to analyze howmeanings of corruptionare made in the context of land grabs in Mumbai andBangalore. Bundles of associated terms like scandal,mafia, goonda (gangster), land sharks, and nexus—in addi-tion to the specific word corruption (both the Englishword corruption and vernacular equivalent brashtachar,common to both Hindi and Kannada) came up repeat-edly to refer to the various mechanisms underlying landgrabs. The range of modalities from the legal to theextra-legal suggests that we need to focus not only on“the inner workings of states in shaping new understand-ings and articulations of territory, sovereignty, authorityand subjects” (Wolford et al. 2013, 195) but also howthese contradictory “inner workings” are perceived andnarrated by ordinary people.We focus on two key arenasof corruptionmeaning making: mechanisms of land graband the hypocrisy of land grabs.

Corruption Meaning Making 1: (In)formalMechanisms of Land Grab

Simpreet Singh, a key Mumbai-based activist of anantidisplacement coalition, the National Alliance ofPeoples’ Movements (NAPM), began filing Right toInformation (RTI)4 petitions on projects around thecity in 2005. In a 2013 interview with the first author,he described the motivations and strategies of antidis-placement struggles: “Scandals are happening everydayand no one sees, no one cares. They just see shiningbuildings. So the movement has to show the scandal ofMumbai’s development . . . to create suspense andshock. . . . It’s the only way.”

Scandal or scam deeply inflects the discursive strate-gies used by activists and themedia alike to narratemech-anisms underlying land grabs. A prominent NAPM(2013) publication titled “The Real Encroachers ofMumbai” draws on RTIs and other sources to expose tenof Mumbai’s most lucrative real estate projects—framedin the report and movement events as outright “scams.”The expos�e took special aim at the extralegal mecha-nisms surrounding the redevelopment of large swathes ofcentrally located land occupied by now-defunct textilemills. With the decline of industry from the 1980s, milllands were turned over to the state government, ostensi-bly for projects in the public interest. Since 1998, how-ever, mill lands have been transformed into luxury


shopping malls, corporate centers, and tower residences.Journalists and activists relay how Maharashtra politi-cians scammed the public by releasing dozens of acres ofprime mill land to developers at “throwaway prices”established through manipulative calculations (Gandhi2005). Open space and affordable housing zoning reserva-tions were also overridden, either fraudulently or due tolast-minute changes in development control rules(D’Monte 2006). Other mechanisms detailed includenepotistic exchanges, the infraction of environmental orpublic use zoning, the use of strong-arm force, kickbacksto politicians and bureaucrats, and an array of legalpractices.

Notions of scam and scandal similarly infuse landgrab narratives in Bangalore. In an interview with thesecond author in 2014, Nikhil, a middle-class activist,denounced a recent luxury special economic zone(SEZ) funded by Dubai-based and domestic capital onone of the largest wetland chains, the Bellandur-Agaralakes, decrying the development as “through andthrough a thing for getting land allotted at cheap rates.It shouts scam!” RTIs sought by Nikhil and his fellowactivists reveal not only that the wetland was allottedby a state agency to private developers at below-mar-ket rates but that the project also violated severalenvironmental protections. To take stock of this andother land scams, a progressive elected state official,A. T. Ramaswamy, formed the Anti-Land GrabbingCommittee of Karnataka in 2013. In a memoaddressed to the Indian prime minister, the Commit-tee insisted that “land grabbing is by far the biggestscam in the country, more serious than the ‘Coalgate’or ‘2G scam’ [multibillion rupee corruption scandalsinvolving the coal and telecommunications sectors,respectively]” (Anti-Land Grabbing Committee2016).

The aura of scam is made all the more potent by therecognition that laws are not only broken but alsobent to the will of the land grabber. Anticorruptionactivists in Mumbai and Bangalore thus spotlight amixture of activities that blur the divide between legaland illegal. Observers contend that corruption is “ill-defined” and in reality refers to a host of legal activitiesnot codified as corruption. For instance, RTI reportsobtained by local activists and citizen journalistsrevealed that the Bangalore Development Authority,the master planning entity for the city, had reclassifiedthe wetland allocated for the SEZ project mentionedearlier from an ecological zone on which developmentwas “prohibited” to an industrial zone on which devel-opment was “permitted.” In Mumbai, legal tactics

narrated as “corruption” similarly include aggressivenew land acquisition protocols and exemptions toplanning rules granted to priority projects.

At the other end of the spectrum of legality, extralegalforce is also deployed—through what Hansen and Step-putat (2006, 305) called “informal sovereigns” or theilliberal underside of the state. In Mumbai, not only dogovernment-dispatched bulldozers and lathi charges(baton-wielding police) violently descend on recalcitrantslum dwellers but so do gangsters employed by legitimatebuilders. In Bangalore, one activist elaborated on strong-arming: “What builders usually do is first they try to throwtheir money around. If they don’t succeed with money,then they start invoking their other kinds of muscle,goonda [gangster] muscle.” Thus an official Governmentof Karnataka report penned by Ramaswamy while he wasin office framed Bangalore as a “haven for landmafias andreal estate sharks” (Karnataka Legislature 2007).

What we mean to show by these word associations isthat corruption talk constitutes a structure of feelingthat is not simply concocted by left activists but ratherforms a more general discursive–affective terrain thattraverses multiple social positionalities and fields. Con-versations with residents ofMandala, a slum inMumbai,for instance, reveal a looming sense of suspicion vis-�a-vis a swampy area adjacent to a recently cleared slumsettlement denoted as “illegal” and protected by no-development zoning: “This is just marshland now, butthe public is saying that Godrej [a major industrial firm]is planning to build something here.” Sentiments ofspeculation, distrust, and rumor thus abound in everydaydiscussions over the fate of land throughout the city.

If scam invokes one set of discursive terms associatedwith land grabs, another set conjures up nexus, nepo-tism, and more generally “top-down” corruption. Theperception that corruption is an entrenched phenome-non emanating from the top came up repeatedly acrossthe two cities. Reflecting on the meaning of corruptionin India more generally, Rekha, a middle-class anti-land-grabbing activist in Bangalore said in an interview:

In the corruption tree, they are just cutting off the leavesand branches; they are not cutting the roots. In spite of allthe mechanisms and laws, why is corruption going onunabated? Shouldn’t you be asking this question? That’swhy we’ve said attack it top to bottom not bottom to top.This is the heart of what we advocate for. Once you punishthe last fellow in the chain, the poorest guy, nothing willhappen because the chain is still there. In fact the chainwill be replaced and made more refined and people at thetop will keep profiting! So you have to start removing cor-ruption from the first top link of the chain.


Although many actors are involved in the“corruption tree,” it is the fact of profits at “the top” thatmakes such collusions so damning. Archana, a lowermiddle-class resident fighting the usurpation ofBangalore’s wetlands, further elaborated to the secondauthor in 2015 why “the roots” of corruption held fast inthe city: “You need to understand that what makes thecity run is just money politics.” Pressed further on whatshe meant by “money politics,” Archana explained thatnot only do corporate developers often bankroll theelectoral campaigns and operations of Karnataka’s poli-ticians but that the politicians themselves moonlight asreal estate brokers or enter politics in the first place onlybecause of the clout of their rural landed families. Thisstructural coproduction of real estate capital and gover-nance pervades both cities.

In Mumbai, such top-to-bottom land grabbing com-plicities also include formerly trusted friends and innerenemies. For instance, one relocated slum residentdescribed the sense of betrayal she felt from a local wardpolitician who “was ruined by money.” In the Mandalaslum referenced earlier, evictees consistently referenceddalals [brokers] working in cahoots with more powerfulinterests to provide information about the area and facili-tate eviction processes. Residents claimed that lalach[greed] led a few local leaders to sell out their fellow resi-dents organizing around eviction and fair relocation. Sev-eral slum residents also indicted nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) facilitating “participatory” reset-tlement as bought-out agents of the state, thus challeng-ing gendered stereotypes in which the participation of“honest” slumwomen is purported to prevent corruption.

“Scam” and “top-down” understandings of corruptionare not separate but rather work to reinforce each other.An English-language newspaper surmises in Mumbai:“Land scams become possible in Maharashtra becausethe bureaucracy is hand in glove with politicians. Virtu-ally everybody from top to bottom is on the gravy trainand works overtime to provide illegal gains to realtors,rather than acting as custodians of public interest” (Khe-tan 2011). One media report further highlighted theprevalence of nepotism: The developer of the Kohinoorluxury high-rise on one of the mill land plots was the sonof a former chief minister of Maharashtra and a keyleader of Mumbai’s Shiv Sena party (Johari 2014). Theprevalence of a builder–politician nexus and nepotisticpower structures mean that in both cities, government ismuch more willing to demolish poorer settlements thanhigh-end developments. This is what we refer to here asthe hypocrisy of land grabs.

Corruption Meaning Making 2: The Hypocrisy ofLand Grabs

Ashok, a lower middle-class shop owner in his mid-forties, lives in a resettlement area on the easternfringes of Mumbai where he was forced to move aftertwo years of wrangling with state agencies and NGOsover the site and process of relocation for a WorldBank–funded road project. In 2007, he took the firstauthor on a tour of the areas near Gazi Nagar, a nowdemolished slum in central Mumbai where he oncelived. “Are you seeing all these buildings?” heexhorted. “This whole posh area is illegal. Our slumarea is truly legal5 but this is the illegal area that harmedall of Mumbai in 2005.” Ashok was referring to thesprawling Bandra-Kurla Complex, a 370-acre commer-cial park housing Citibank, Dow, and the stockexchange built despite flood warnings on the marshywetlands of Mumbai in the early 1990s.

Similar narratives critiquing the hypocrisy of landgovernance are at play in Bangalore. One monsoonafternoon in July 2014, the second author met withArchana, the aforementionedmiddle-class activist fight-ing the SEZ on the Bellandur-Agara wetlands. Leadingthe way through a small entrance onto the banks ofAgara, Archana stopped and gazed out over the horizon,her eyes scanning the large construction site and otherdevelopments ringing the water body: “This is not aboutthe small huts that are coming here and there. What isdisgusting is when the lake is made into a big apartmentcomplex. It’s so much easier to clear a slum encroach-ment than it is to move a big encroachment.” Archanaand members of Bangalore’s Anti-Land Grabbing Com-mittee take issue with a definitional slippage strategi-cally deployed by the government to collapse two verydifferent types of unlawful activities: land encroachment(“small huts coming up here and there”) and land grab-bing (“when the lake is made into a big apartmentcomplex”). As Rekha explained further:

Encroachment is when you take a small piece of adjacentland. You don’t have title to that land. You cannot sellthat land. But you just cultivate it; you use it for yourown survival needs or you build something small on it.But land grabbing is when you take possession of land forwhich you are never entitled to it. And if you take pos-session of it, then you can sell it. . . . You can make ahuge profit on it. So this is how land grabbing makes atotal killing!

Shehnaz, a Muslim resident of a Mumbai slum desig-nated as an illegal encroachment, echoed aspects of


Rekha’s narrative from her own situated experience.Her settlement has been evicted three times with noentitlement to compensation because it was ostensiblysettled after a state-stipulated “cutoff date” (i.e., thedate of settlement after which residents are not eligiblefor resettlement). Such dire forms of eviction have hitdiscriminated Muslims and other “outsiders” especiallyhard. She passionately denounced:

The whole of Hiranandani complex was built after1995. . . . They were able to settle afterwards becausethey could afford to pay 20 million rupees of blackmoney, because they are literate, because they wearneckties, because they drive cars—that’s why they areconsidered to be citizens.

The ultraluxury complex to which she is referringbecame the center of controversy and investigationafter activists’ exposed how the 300-acre plot wasreleased to developers at a subsidized rate to buildaffordable housing units. Along with her neighbors,Shenaz has been struggling to reclaim her land withthe support of NAPM activists who argue that suchevictions of the poor are outrageous in a city wherethe elite engage in far worse actions.

The language of activists and residents like Sim-preet, Ashok, and Shehnaz in Mumbai and Ram-aswamy, Rekha, and Archana in Bangalore is inkeeping with a general dissatisfaction amongMumbai’s and Bangalore’s poor and lower middleclasses that efforts to “regularize” urban informality(i.e., transform land tenure from unauthorized toauthorized through eviction or the levying of heftypenalties) unjustly target lower income residentswhile those at the top of the corruption chain areallowed to go free. Disciplining the poor occupies aspectrum of punishing and accommodating strate-gies. For instance, on one end are the violent anduncompensated evictions of illegal settlements thatoften target groups that are multiply discriminatedby class, ethnicity, caste, and religion. In the narra-tive of an activist report in Mumbai:

Illegal and inhuman treatment is meted out under thepretext that . . . [slum and pavement dwellers, street ven-dors, fishermen] are encroachers. From bureaucrats topoliticians, who at the first place thrive on the bribesand votes of these very populations, curse them and ordertheir eviction. The city actually has been encroachedupon—its resources from land to water are being usurped.But the question is by whom, who are these encroachers:slum dwellers or someone else? (Ghar Bachao GharBanao Andolan 2013, 2)

On the other end, the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme(SRS), specific to Mumbai, seeks to offer a “kinder,gentler” approach through developer-provided formalresettlement flats, while also freeing land for commer-cial development. The highly controversial 2013Akrama Sakrama [turn “wrong/illegal” into “right/legal”] regularization scheme in Bangalore similarlydoes not evict but rather slaps steep penalties on lowerand middle-income informal residents for violations ofbylaws, ownership, and titling norms. As we discussnext, “corrective” and punishing interventions alikehave since become subject to corruption charges inboth cities for laying bear blatant dispossessions andthe erosion of the public interest.

Betraying the Public’s Interest:Anticorruption Discourse and theImmorality of Dispossession

[M]oney [is] being pilfered from even the poorest citizen,including the pavement dweller. . . . Our governmentsare giving away our commons; our money is being usedto support the lifestyles of a few. Government officialsargue that they are doing it by various rules and resolu-tions, and in “public interest.” (Gandhi 2005)

The soon-to-be famous RTI activist ShaileshGandhi (quoted earlier) calculated millions of rupeesin losses due to the irregularities in public land leasesto elites who enjoyed ludicrously discounted rates forprime properties in Mumbai. After filing dozens of RTIpetitions, Gandhi, a relatively affluent owner of a plas-tics company, became a public figure who went on tomake a career as the head of the Information Commis-sion overseeing such cases across India. Activists andlower class residents in Mumbai and Bangalore havesince echoed Gandhi. While the corruption discoursesdiscussed earlier tapped into a collective sense of dis-trust and moral reprobation of the informal modalitiesand hypocritical biases of urban land governance, anemerging idiom centered on the public interest moredirectly calls attention to corruption’s dispossessingeffects.

Slum-Based Mobilizations

In Mumbai, slum clearances and redevelopmenthave become a center of controversy and activism inwhich various harms suffered by the lower classes haveentered into the discursive field of corruption. The first


author accompanied a few resident-driven mobiliza-tions in the aforementioned Gazi Nagar settlement in2006. Poor and lower middle-class residents and shopowners were contesting displacement by a WorldBank–funded road project on grounds of corruption intwo arenas. One charge challenged the proposed pathof the road through housing structures when it couldhave easily run through an adjacent area fraudulentlyusurped by a local politician. A second charge tookaim at a world-renowned NGO that was commis-sioned to facilitate community resettlement. Residentleaders argued that they were given “no account” of aper person 20-rupee charge leveled by the NGO.Because these corruption charges seemed rather mini-mal or indirect, the first author pushed resident leadersAshok and Manoj to explain further. Ashok replied,“See it isn’t right that we must move from our centrallocation to Lallubhai colony [a notoriously crowdedand underserviced resettlement colony on the easternfringe of the city].” Manoj added, “How can we makea living there? We are losing everything we spent ourlives building. It’s like we are being sent back twenty-five years.” Residents were able to temporarily halt theproject and secure a better deal through a variety ofpublicized agitations and support from the NAPM andMedha Patkar, a veteran antidisplacement activistwith a long and famed history of agitating against theWorld Bank. By yoking charges of procedural irregu-larities with the loss of livelihood and a lifetime ofinvestment, Gazi Nagar residents stretched corruptiondiscourse to spotlight material dispossession.

Critiques of the erosion of the broader public inter-est via profit-driven corruption and its associated dam-aging effects mounted from 2007 to 2015, especiallysurrounding Mumbai’s SRS. The SRS was inauguratedin the mid-1990s as a quintessential public–privatepartnership that sought to eliminate slums and ostensi-bly include the lower classes in less punishing waysthan evictions. The implementing agency, the SlumRedevelopment Authority (SRA), facilitates slumclearance, delivering lucrative commercial rights todevelopers on newly available land. In exchange,developers must provide onsite resettlement flats informal buildings to eligible displaced residents pendingthe consent of at least 70 percent. Despite its inclusivepremise, SRS excludes tens of thousands of noneligibleresidents of so-called illegal slums and informal rent-ers, among others, especially marginalizing poorer anddiscriminated ethno-religious groups. These exclusionsreflect the fact that slums are a heterogeneous categoryencompassing a wide range of socioeconomic and legal

statuses and that the market-based model reinforcesinequalities among slum dwellers through restrictingresettlement to remain profitable (Doshi 2013).

The much-hailed model soon became mired inscandal and critiques of “builders [and] their corruptnexus with politicians-police-bureaucrats” (NAPM2007). RTI and other investigations revealed millionsof rupees in kickbacks paid to the officials of the SRA(the implementing agency), hundreds of dummynames added and eligible residents omitted from bene-ficiary lists,6 forged signatures on consent documenta-tion, and false or trumped-up charges leveled againstrecalcitrant slum dwellers (Khetan 2011).

To harness a wide range of testimonials of slum resi-dents’ experiences of dispossession as legitimate evi-dence for corruption (in addition to the infringementsjust mentioned), activists began to deploy jan sunvaisor “people’s hearings” from 2007 to 2014. Jan sunvaisare performative public events initiated in rural areasduring the 1990s to expose experiences of corruptionin front of invited officials. At one event attended bythe first author in 2007, for instance, hundreds ofevictees of a designated illegal slum gathered around amakeshift tent on the muddy grounds of their clearedsettlement and painstakingly recounted the disrespect-ful runaround they faced in attempting to secure vitaldocuments from authorities (see Figure 1). Althoughnot without limitation, Baviskar (2007) noted, “Toenable the poor to literally speak truth to power is thejan sunvais’ great achievement” (8).

From 2007 to 2014, jan sunvais organized by theNAPM became a space to voice myriad grievances ineviction and resettlement. Such efforts are especiallysalient in urban India where slum dwellers, vilified asfreeloading encroachers, rarely benefit from the publicsympathies afforded to the exploited rural poor who areseen as the moral core of the nation. The jan sunvaieventually morphed into the formation of the PeoplesCommission on Irregularities and Illegalities in SRAprojects (henceforth the Commission) in 2013. TheCommission established a collaborative and participa-tory process including slum leaders and residents,researchers from a social science institute, NAPM acti-vists, and eminent progressive public figures. Overseven months, public inquires and hearings were con-ducted in six different SRS sites in which residents pro-vided testimonials of the hardships they incurred.

The first author attended an event in July 2013 thatlaunched a report of findings from this process. In atten-dance were the Commission members and nearly 300slum residents from a broad range of socioeconomic


backgrounds gathered in a musty press event hall inMumbai’s southern business district (see Figure 2). Theevent began with Commission members recounting keyfindings of “fraud” to the audience and members of thepress, followed by speeches and testimonials by slum rep-resentatives. They relayed how developer manipula-tions—including faulty lists, delays, and noncompliantarchitectural plans—worked to marginalize communityrights. They recounted intimidation tactics includingthe demolition of critical amenities (a toilet block inone case) and threats of denying flats to agitators. Oneof the Commission members, Dr. Amita Bhide, a profes-sor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, explainedthe structural aspects of the plan that allow builders tomanipulate the process and maximize profits causingsevere suffering and loss for slum residents.

In the middle of Bhide’s explanation, one journalistgot impatient. He interrupted her, demanding con-crete names of “rotten apple” officials involved toshore up a sensationalist story. “This is fine,” he said,clearly frustrated. “But can you tell me exactly whichofficials are involved—some names of key players?”Bhide deliberately avoided the journalist’s individual-izing discourse in favor of emphasizing patterns of dis-possession imbricating officials, developers, and localpromoters. She and others reiterated the point thatrather than serving as a slum rehabilitation scheme

[punarvasan yojana], rather than serving the “publicinterest” as proffered by government officials, SRS iseffectively a scheme of “displacement” [vistapan] and“land grab” [zameen hadap] that is inherently fraudu-lent for privileging builders’ profit at the expense ofthe housing rights of the poor.

One hardship highlighted was the suffering andlosses incurred after slum clearance and before reset-tlement. During this period—lasting two to tenyears7—“beneficiaries” are dispersed into distant,crowded, overheated, and mosquito-infested transitcamps with contaminated water and no working sani-tation—conditions far worse than those in mostslums. They conveyed that relocation to offsite transitcamps entailed loss of wages and the cost of rentingin other more habitable settlements. Finally, thosewho had managed to acquire resettlement lamentedbeing condemned to life in shoddily constructed andunderserviced buildings—what many called “verticalslums.” Commission members juxtaposed these hard-ships with the millions of rupees in profits accrued todevelopers from the commercial properties enabledby SRS—with reference to calculations provided ina section of the report titled “Magnitude ofCorruption.”

Another more fundamental critique highlightingthe immorality of evictions denounced resettlement

Figure 1. Slum residents in Mumbai gathered for a jan sunvai. (Color figure available online.)


eligibility restrictions for “illegal” slums as“fundamentally wrong” and “discriminatory,” alludingto the fact that many are poorer and marginalizedethno-religious groups and that exclusions keep SRAprofitable while rendering thousands homeless. Aijaz,a fifty-year-old Muslim evictee of an “illegal” slumdemolished in a sweep that destroyed 90,000 homes,presented the final testimonial speech of the event.Aijaz passionately condemned SRA as “completelycorrupt” because of how few houses it was providingto the poor. He demanded the scrapping of thebuilder-centered SRS in favor of swe-vikas [self-development]. The Commission report echoed thecall for a noncommercial model8 “guided by publicinterest”—and not profit—including the constructionof affordable rental housing, the elimination of eligi-bility exclusions, and the establishment of a federalprogram to support community-led rehabilitation.What we found was that such narratives broaden themoral critique in which corruption becomes definednot only by dubiously legal or irregular proceduresbut also by its undermining of the public interest,defined here as the housing and economic disposses-sion of the poor. Struggles to replace SRS continuetoday as newly elected Prime Minister Modi seeks toreplicate the controversial “Mumbai model” acrossIndia.

Informal Middle-Class Mobilizations

In Bangalore, similar anticorruption narratives cen-tered on the immorality of housing and land disposses-sion have erupted especially around land grabsendangering the city’s peripheral lands. A few wordsabout the sociospatial differences between the two cit-ies are in order to better understand convergent anddivergent narratives. Unlike Mumbai, Bangalore doesnot concentrate vast inner-city slum settlements andthus does not exhibit the same magnitude of corrup-tion-embattled eviction and resettlement scandals,nor the same kind of grassroots energies contestingtheir dispossessing effects. On the other hand, Banga-lore does exhibit a highly heterogeneous property-owning (if not always securely so) middle class. AsKamath and Vijayabaskar (2014) put it, in Bangalore“the middle classes’ project of gentrification is far fromcomplete or neat” (149); many of these groups engagein struggles for housing and land via the sphere of elec-toral politics and connections forged with informalsovereigns; that is, tactics typically associated withslums. Yet, at the lower end of the spectrum, middle-class groups in Bangalore do not live in officially desig-nated slums but rather inhabit a range of“unauthorized,” legally tenuous residential develop-ments (visually defined by concrete blocks, dusty

Figure 2. Event to expose developer fraud featuring prominent slum and other social activists in Mumbai. (Color figure available online.)


roads, trash dumps, and minimal infrastructure), espe-cially at the once-agricultural periphery.

The legally tenuous nature of peripheral middle-class settlements has placed land and property at thecenter of their civic struggles (Ranganathan 2014).Similar to Mumbai, anticorruption has taken on apowerful moral valence in light of the erosion of the“public interest” posed by land grabs. The dispossessingeffects of, on the one hand, absolving land grabs by thewealthy and, on the other, slapping hefty penaltieson—or worse yet, evicting—lower middle-class settle-ments have catalyzed anticorruption discourse. In2012, the second author accompanied city engineersto the site of a recent demolition drive in a Muslim-majority outlying flood-prone neighborhood, MadinaNagar. Officially, the neighborhood was targetedfor demolition because it was obstructing a stormchannel; half the houses were removed and theremaining ones were slated for demolition the follow-ing month. Conversations with residents, however,also exposed concerns revolving around minority dis-crimination, layered on top of the benami [fraudulent]land deals by authorities and developers that hadallowed settlement on the flood plain in the firstplace.

One resident, Fateema, lamented as she picked herway through her neighbor’s rubble:

It’s not enough that our possessions were damaged withrains—our saris, TV, chairs—now we are losing ourhouse, too. But why don’t they remove those encroach-ments, those big buildings where big big people [dodddodd janaru] live? And what about the temples? Nobodytouches them. They gave permission to all of us; now weare the ones who have to suffer.

Mary, a resident of a nearby settlement, who hadobserved the demolition of Madina Nagar, commentedthat the process was “totally corrupt, corruption atevery level—why did they allow that layout to comeup in the first place? Why [do] they choose some todemolish, not others?”

Under the pretext of environmental protectionand “maintaining law and order,” a much largerdemolition drive targeting “encroachments” on sev-eral lakes in peripheral Bangalore ensued in 2014and 2015, further bringing to light the selectivepolitics of dispossession. Predictably, lower incomesettlements were targeted. Rekha, one of the mem-bers of the Anti-Land Grabbing Committee, framedsuch dispossession in light of the “corruption” thatpropels it:

Take the example of [what the government did to] Chik-kalasandra Lake—here, all poor people’s houses on it arealmost totally demolished. There were pregnant women,small school going children who had nowhere to go. . . .Suddenly school was affected. It was [a] huge chaos. Youcannot do [things] like this. You yourself [the govern-ment] have given under your stamp and seal that theseare genuine documents. These poor people have boughtthese lands based on them. You first create an alternativeplace for them. Allow them to comfortably move to thatplace. Children changing schools is difficult. Let themsettle [in a new place]. Finally demolish. [You can’t just]first bring bulldozer and start demolishing. They alwaysstart with small buildings and immediately with the bull-dozer. Why? This is how corruption works—the authori-ties tell the apartment people to go get a stay order. Butthey never tell the poor people.

Following the demolition drive, the Anti-Land Grab-bing Committee wrote to the Chief Minister of Karna-taka, admonishing the government for dispossessing“innocent citizens who have not only lost all their lifeearnings, but also have been mercilessly thrown onstreets” (Anti-Land Grabbing Committee 2015b, 1).Leading with a 1948 quote from Mahatma Gandhiabout how dealing with corruption requires “a highcode of morals,” another memo addressed toKarnataka’s governor states: “Encroachment by thepoor for livelihood has to be dealt with in a morehumane approach as there is no criminality involved”(Anti-Land Grabbing Committee 2015a, 2, italicsadded). As in Mumbai, these narratives are focusednot simply on the mechanisms or hypocrisy of landgrabs, but they also morally condemn the disposses-sion—in this case a loss in schooldays, loss in housing,and loss in earnings—entailed.

Such narratives are not simply restricted to inse-curely propertied groups directly affected by demoli-tion drives but have also filtered into popularopinion. Media reports in 2015 explicitly exposethe politics of dispossession with article titles like“Demolition Drive in Bengaluru Brings downHomes of the Poor, Religious StructuresUntouched” (Nayantara 2015). The fact that Hindutemples, in addition to larger apartment buildingsand colleges, built illicitly on lake land were sparedfrom the bulldozer, whereas poorer homes bore thebrunt of destruction, was called out in the media asa clear case of “[wanting] to protect the big fish,i.e. “corrupt officials and politicians” (“MajorDemolition Drive On” 2015). It is noteworthy thatin a Hindu majority country, illicitly built temples


have not been immune from public scrutiny, sug-gesting that this moment holds a particular politicaland moral urgency that corruption talk has beenable to leverage. At the same time, we should becautious about unequivocally celebrating the pro-gressive potential of corruption talk given the elec-tion of a conservative Hindu prime minister,Narendra Modi, in 2014. Here, then, is a discursiveterrain that is slippery and malleable to the politi-cal, economic, and cultural forces of the moment.

Convergent and Divergent Framings ofAnticorruption

We reflect here on the similarities and dissimilar-ities between our two cases, as well as some potentialdangers and limitations of corruption talk. First, as dis-cussed, Mumbai and Bangalore exhibit importantsociospatial differences rooted in different historicallegacies. What does this mean for anticorruptionmeaning making? Although there are certainly sym-bolic alliances between slum and lower middle-classgroups (as many so-called slum dwellers are lower mid-dle class in expensive urban land markets and muchlower middle-class housing is informal), it would be astretch to say that the poor and middle class haveunited over a sense of corruption as injustice. As Jef-frey and Young (2014) showed, corruption discoursescan be mobilized for socially regressive purposes thattoo conveniently align with neoliberal ideologies. InBangalore, elite middle-class mobilizations aroundland encroachments are not necessarily progressive.High-rise apartment-dwelling groups look on slumsand lower income encroachments on lakes with dis-dain, seeing these as tarnishing the lakescwildlife, aes-thetic, and recreational value. Many of Bangalore’smore elite English-speaking middle classes harbor dis-trust of those they see as “criminal” and “corrupt,”including Kannada-speaking politicians and the“uneducated” constituencies they attract. They echofamiliar, classist, and casteist notions of corruption,revealing rifts between the politics of marginal andelite groups. Similar complaints abound amongMumbai’s upper classes and even among slum ownersagainst informal renters who are usually the most vul-nerable to displacement. Alliances have also often loststeam once the demands of relatively privileged groups(Hindus as opposed to Muslims, upper middle class asopposed to poorer middle class, authorized as opposedto illegal slum dwellers, etc.) are met. Ultimately,

aspirations for property owning and consumption life-styles—from heterogeneous slum dwellers to the mid-dle classes—might not easily lend themselves to broadcross-class alliances and radical agendas.

We should also be clear that anticorruption doesnot always result in progressive outcomes. To the con-trary, the “politics of stealth” (Benjamin 2008, 726)—informal negotiations with lower bureaucrats and sur-reptitious encroachment—might still be a more effec-tive way to meet housing needs for the poor thansanitized, corruption-free options. This is corroboratedby the experience of Mumbai’s Mandala slum dwellerswho have languished for more than eleven years tryingto reclaim their slum through a federal (non-market-based) rehabilitation scheme that was promised butnever delivered. Although not applicable to our cases,elsewhere urban middle-class transparency activistsseeking to “empower the poor” have counterproduc-tively denigrated the informal practices and relationswith the state on which the poor crucially depend(Webb 2012).

In sum, we do not wish to generalize anticorruptiondiscourse as uniformly progressive, structural, or justiceoriented. Nor do we wish to gloss movements againstland enclosures uniformly as “resistance.” Not only isthere an “extraordinary array of struggles unleashed byaccumulation by dispossession” (Hart 2006, 983), butpolitical responses “from below” take a variety offorms, from resistance to acquiescence to active sup-port of land grabbers (Borras et al. 2011). Still, thereis strong evidence that allegations of corruption inurban India’s land grabs are aimed at exposing tangledrelations of power and structural inequality. By pre-senting a vehement and effective critique of real estatecapital, the complex terrain of corruption politics can-not be dismissed as yet another instantiation of neolib-eral subjectification (see also Walton 2016).

Conclusion

In this article, we took seriously the situated meaningsattached to corruption. In a moment marked by growinginequality in India’s cities, we showed that corruptiontalk among lower class informal residents, activists, andothers serves to critically narrate land enclosures, a cen-tral driver of capitalist accumulation in India today.Through ethnographic and archival data from Mumbaiand Bangalore, we demonstrated how anticorruption dis-courses andmobilizations eschewed individualizing, legal-istic, and apolitical framings so common in mainstream


accounts. Although no magic bullet, these mobilizationshave had real material effects. For instance, some ofMumbai’s slum redevelopment schemes have been stalleddue to combined anticorruption and antidisplacementactivism, whereas in others residents have been able tonegotiate better resettlement deals. In Bangalore, theAnti-Land Grabbing Committee has succeeded in stem-ming further demolitions, also gaining wide press cover-age for their insistence on differentiating “criminal” landgrabs from “noncriminal” encroachments. Although theultimate fate of the SEZ coming up on the wetlands is yetto be determined, corporate developers have thus farbeen fined and publicly exposed.

In both cities, an associated set of discourses linkedto scam and scandal reflected a “structure of feeling” ofmoral reprobation and distrust that came to defineland grabs as corrupt. This affective and discursiveturn cannot be understood without attention to infor-mality as a historically specific, flexible regime of rule.Strategically traversing a spectrum of informal and for-mal governing logics, land grabs have come under firefor their elite biases and antipoor hypocrisies. Under-standings of land grabs as a betrayal of the public’sinterest further extend the meaning of corruption todenounce housing and economic dispossessions asimmoral even if not always illegal. Crucially, ourinformants’ admonition of the betrayal of the publicinterest is a politically salient inversion in India wheredisplacement stemming from state- and private sector–led development is typically couched in elite, liti-gation-backed notions of public interest (Bhan 2016).

In both of our cases, anticorruption struggles alsoallowed for the formation of symbolic and actually exist-ing coalitions across lower and lower middle-class sub-jects. In Mumbai, anticorruption politics enrolled aneconomically and ethnically heterogeneous group of slumdwellers with differentiated legal status. Aligning witheach other and public figures, such a diverse group wasable to contest real estate–dominated slum redevelop-ment. Meanwhile, in Bangalore, we found that the inter-ests of the informal middle class were very much centeredon questions of land tenure, much as in slums. Althoughlower middle-class groups do not face the same degree ofexploitation as slums, they nevertheless voice similar cri-tiques over the hypocrisy of penalizing “encroachments”by the poor while absolving the “land grabs” of the rich.Such a convergence and sense of class coalition does notnecessarily hold true for the upper middle classes,however. As we highlighted earlier, there are potentialconflicts vis-�a-vis corruption framings across India’sheterogeneous urban classes.

Theoretically, we have sought to contribute tocritical ethnographic and geographic treatments ofcorruption by discursively analyzing corruption in theurban sphere—a topic pertinent to struggles in manyparts of the world and one that academics have yet toexplore sufficiently. We have also sought to bridge“thick” descriptions of corruption discourse with polit-ical-economic and conjunctural analysis. FollowingJeffrey (2010), we find that corruption talk indeed rep-resents a diverse political field shaped by sometimescontradictory experiences of—and perpetuations of—fraud, looting, and dispossession. Like other criticalscholars, we found corruption to be a multivalent fieldin the sense that it allows for a yoking of diverse cri-tiques (e.g., the simultaneous critique of legal andextralegal land transactions). Indeed, corruption is apowerful semantic and affective rubric preciselybecause it enables normative assessment of actionsregardless of their purported “legality.”

At the same time, we also note the salience of a spe-cific historical and geographic moment of crisis andpolitical legitimacy in India (and many other parts ofthe world), one marked by an unparalleled concentra-tion of wealth. Here, consideration of what Gramsci(1971, 400) called the “terrain of the conjunctural”—the coming together of social and political forces toestablish hegemonic regimes and new opportunitiesfor contestation—is crucial; after all, political fields(of corruption or otherwise) are not fixed but con-stantly shift and are subject to molding by myriadpolitical, social, and economic pressures. Bringing con-junctural analysis together with the recognition of cor-ruption as a cultural field, we believe, provides a usefulway to ascertain how, why, and when certain politicalformations of corruption emerge as they do.

We suggest that this very set of questions mightform the basis of a promising “critical corruptionresearch” agenda beyond Mumbai and Bangalore.Geographic scholarship focusing on how corruptionmeanings shift across space and time can enrich along-standing anthropological focus on situated dis-courses. Critical geographic research can also examinehow corruption is integral to—and not eliminatedby—the workings of advanced capitalism. How legal,extralegal, and extraeconomic strategies are deployedin myriad forms of dispossession across the north andsouth, for instance, and how such dispossession is nar-rated should form a key component of critical corrup-tion studies.

Critical corruption studies can also explore howanticorruption mobilizations jump scale. For instance,


anticorruption mobilizations in Mumbai and Banga-lore were influenced by more progressive strains of thenational Right to Information movement (Baviskar2007). They were further invigorated by the nationalanticorruption fervor in 2011 led by Gandhian cru-sader Anna Hazare. Despite Hazare’s more middle-class message, a number of slum activists in Mumbai,such as Medha Patkar, joined the anticorruption-focused national Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), led byRTI leader and right-hand advisor to Hazare, ArvindKejriwal. Participation in electoral politics was newand unknown territory for such activists and entailedcampaigning alongside moderate elites. Indeed, cross-class alliances are necessary even as they are slipperyand sometimes dangerous terrain for social justicemobilizations (Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015).

Critical corruption studies would thus have to takea hard look at the progressive potential of anticorrup-tion instantiations. For instance, in suggesting thatlower class coalitions have united around the injusticeof corruption, we must be careful not to assume thatthis progressive trend will always hold true. In the2014 national elections, the right-wing BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi came topower. Modi’s campaign, too, capitalized on frustra-tions over corruption by offering an authoritarian,Hindu nationalist, and neoliberal antidote to the“mess” of the country. The BJP proved to be victori-ous, even though the AAP gained unexpected victo-ries in Delhi and Punjab that year. As a result, wehave seen a number of regressive ramifications, includ-ing a potentially problematic Hindu nationalist dis-course around “cleaning up” India (of dirt, corruption,and minorities) and a move by AAP toward more cen-trist, accommodative, and technocratic politics. It istelling that in the lead-up to national elections in theUnited States in 2016, notions that “the system isrigged” and that corruption had reached unprece-dented levels found appeal among both the left andright, once again revealing the term’s slipperiness andopportunistic usage.

In the final analysis, it would be na€ıve to unequivo-cally romanticize anticorruption discourse. Yet, itwould also be premature to dismiss anticorruptionstruggles as yet another neoliberal ruse. The terrain ofthe political does not always offer a pristine ideologicalstance through which to mobilize diverse constituents.Corruption talk is contradictory and multivalent; thisis, after all, what gives it semantic force. In high-stakesmoments, however, it can marshal moral indictmentsdirected toward progressive causes. It is therefore

imperative for critical scholars to ascertain how cor-ruption politics are expanding—rather than disappear-ing—from geographies of advanced capitalism.

Acknowledgments

For useful comments received on prior drafts andpresentations, and other input, we would like to thank,without implication, Susan Shepler, Jordanna Matlon,Erin Collins, Hun Kim, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace,Kendra Salois, Lauren Carruth, Simpreet Singh,Amita Bhide, Wendy Wolford, and three very insight-ful anonymous reviewers. This work was also presentedat paper sessions on corruption at the 2014 AnnualMeeting of the American Association of Geographers,and we thank the participants for their contributionsto our thinking. We are also very grateful to Annalseditor Nik Heynen for so expertly steering the reviewprocess. Finally, we remain indebted to the activistsand residents of Mumbai and Bangalore who workhard every day to fight myriad forms of dispossessionand injustice and who generously shared their storieswith us.

Notes1. Slums are diverse in terms of their socioeconomic

makeup and legal status (see also Note 5). The 2011Indian Census defines a slum as “residential areas wheredwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons ofdilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements anddesign of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrange-ment of street, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitationfacilities or any combination of these factors which aredetrimental to . . . safety and health” (Government ofIndia 2011).

2. Note that cultural relativism is common in mainstreamcorruption approaches. For instance, the 2015 WorldDevelopment Report rehashes simplistic corruption para-digms through a behavioral economics approach thatcontinues to pathologize “cultures” of corruption innon-Western societies (World Bank 2015).

3. Luxemburg saw these as prevalent especially in colonialexpansion projects, whereas Harvey focuses on a rangeof neoliberal predations from slum evictions to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

4. RTI legislation, finally passed after ten years of mobiliza-tions, aims to provide citizens quick and easy access togovernment documents to “promote transparency andaccountability . . . and contain corruption and make ourdemocracy work for the people in a real sense.” Althoughthe efficacy of RTI legislation has been far from consis-tent—and, indeed, there have been several instances ofmisuse or incompetence—several activists still see it asone of the fewmeans of accessing information.


5. Slums referred to as “legal” are those that have under-gone processes of official regularization (“recognition”or “notification”). In Mumbai, such status requires vari-ous documentations including proof of settlementbefore a stipulated cutoff date (1 January 1995 but morerecently moved to 2000). Regularization of slums doesnot guarantee tenure security, but it does entitle resi-dents to access government services and compensation.Slum structures and settlements that do not have thesedocuments are designated as “illegal,” and inhabitantsare denied rights to resettlement compensation. Thesecategorizations are subject to myriad manipulations byauthorities.

6. The SRS has built-in incentives to simultaneouslyinflate beneficiary lists and also exclude based on eligi-bility to maximize profits through the commercial salecomponent of redevelopment.

7. Delays in developer construction projects were purport-edly linked to economic slowdown.

8. Although such a program exists in smaller towns inIndia through the federal Rajiv Awas Yojana, the Stateof Maharashtra has resisted replacing SRS because ofthe strong developer interest in retaining the scheme.

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SAPANA DOSHI is Assistant Professor in the School ofGeography and Development at the University of Arizona,Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected]. Herresearch interests include urban social mobilization andpolitical subjectivity, land dispossession, ethno-nationalistcultural politics, critical development studies, state theory,and transnational feminist geography.

MALINI RANGANATHAN is Assistant Professor in theSchool of International Service at American University,Washington, DC 20016. E-mail: [email protected]. Herinterests at the nexus of critical urban studies and radicalgeography include the political ecology of water and land,urban informality and state formation, and racial and envi-ronment

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