India's demotic democracy and its 'depravities' in the ethnographic longue duree

TY - CHAP

T1 - India's demotic democracy and its 'depravities' in the ethnographic longue duree

AU - Piliavsky, Anastasia

PY - 2014/11/1

Y1 - 2014/11/1

N2 - In the spring of 2012 the Socialist Party in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) won a landslide election to the State Legislative Assembly. The victory became India’s political event of the year, marking the return of the notoriously corrupt and criminalised political party to the helm of India’s flagship state. A year earlier in 2011 political activist Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare had gone on an indefinite anti-corruption hunger strike, which became the most dramatic political statement made in the same country that year. The stated ambition of Hazare and his (mostly middle-class) followers was to wipe the tarnish of corruption off India’s biggest political trophy: its status as the ‘world’s largest democracy’. Celebrations of India’s democratic boom and lamentations over its corruption crisis are equally audible in political statements made at home and abroad. Reports on the UP election were but an instance of this bipolar view. Here commentators noted that while electoral participation reached some of the highest national and global levels, peaking in 2012, corruption also rose to astonishing proportions, even by South Asian standards. This paradox raises several questions. How can the two Indias- the populist and the corrupt-exist side by side, and not just coexist, but also seemingly reinforce one another? Why do so many Indian citizens continue to elect so many corrupt politicians into office, supporting what looks like rampant political chaos in their state? Why do the reportedly widespread depravities of India’s political life fail to instil endemic apathy in its electorate? And what does this tell us about the relation between ‘democracy’ and ‘corruption’-and indeed about what democracy is, what it is not, and what we hope it may be-not only in India, but also in the wider world?.

AB - In the spring of 2012 the Socialist Party in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) won a landslide election to the State Legislative Assembly. The victory became India’s political event of the year, marking the return of the notoriously corrupt and criminalised political party to the helm of India’s flagship state. A year earlier in 2011 political activist Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare had gone on an indefinite anti-corruption hunger strike, which became the most dramatic political statement made in the same country that year. The stated ambition of Hazare and his (mostly middle-class) followers was to wipe the tarnish of corruption off India’s biggest political trophy: its status as the ‘world’s largest democracy’. Celebrations of India’s democratic boom and lamentations over its corruption crisis are equally audible in political statements made at home and abroad. Reports on the UP election were but an instance of this bipolar view. Here commentators noted that while electoral participation reached some of the highest national and global levels, peaking in 2012, corruption also rose to astonishing proportions, even by South Asian standards. This paradox raises several questions. How can the two Indias- the populist and the corrupt-exist side by side, and not just coexist, but also seemingly reinforce one another? Why do so many Indian citizens continue to elect so many corrupt politicians into office, supporting what looks like rampant political chaos in their state? Why do the reportedly widespread depravities of India’s political life fail to instil endemic apathy in its electorate? And what does this tell us about the relation between ‘democracy’ and ‘corruption’-and indeed about what democracy is, what it is not, and what we hope it may be-not only in India, but also in the wider world?.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84948655782&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1017/CBO9781107296930.008

DO - 10.1017/CBO9781107296930.008

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:84948655782

SN - 9781107056084

SP - 154

EP - 175

BT - Patronage as Politics in South Asia

PB - Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

CY - Cambridge

ER -