Anshul Trivedi 
The news of former Maharashtra chief minister and Congress stalwart Ashok Chavan switching to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has given rise to a familiar spurt of arguments in the media eco-system which holds the Congress leadership squarely responsible for this defection. These arguments do not explain much but merely amplify the narrative of the regime that there is no alternative to it; which, in the absence of a credible record of governance, is essential to its electoral strategy.
However, the argument of deficient leadership does not hold for three reasons. First, the phenomenon of defections is not restricted to only one party but afflicts the entire opposition. Second, if the defections were merely the result of a fallout with the leadership or triggered by ideological disagreements, these politicians could have decided to form their own parties. There are numerous such examples in history from across the political divide. However, these defectors unfailingly join either the ruling party or the ruling coalition. Third, and most significantly, these defectors were invariably accused of corruption and were under the radar of government agencies.
It is important to note that even Chavan was accused of corruption by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Interestingly, he is not alone. The tactic of weaponising institutions to blackmail and co-opt the opposition has become common knowledge. It would not be an overstatement to say that by co-opting opposition leaders he once accused of corruption, the prime minister has decisively buried the issue altogether.
Therefore, rather than looking at these defections as isolated events, it would be much more analytically rewarding to look at them as the logical culmination of the political process which was set in motion by the anti-corruption movement.
Deliberately misunderstanding corruption
At the outset, it must be stated that the movement against corruption was bereft of any idea of justice – social or economic. While the ideas of social justice were conspicuously absent from the movement, the issues of economic justice were merely a derivative concern.
It was argued that once the corrupt political elite was defeated, a more responsive and transparent state would address the redistributive concerns. However, the movement resolutely avoided offering a systemic understanding of corruption, thereby restricting its attack to the political elite, while maintaining a studied silence on the economic elite constituted by the rent-seeking corporate class which was equally complicit in and the prime beneficiary of the system.
Prime Minister Modi built his campaign upon this flawed understanding of the issue of corruption and converted the 2014 election campaign into a referendum against the ‘corrupt’ political elite. He promised to clamp down on corruption through the introduction of the Lokpal and bring back black money and distribute it to the honest tax payer. However, once the political elite was defeated, no such measures were initiated to tackle corruption except demonetisation which turned out to be a spectacular failure.
A new elite compact
What emerged rather was a new compact between the political and economic elite where the ruling regime ensured unfettered access to public resources to the corporate class in exchange for political funding and propaganda. Even the Supreme Court observed, while declaring the electoral bonds unconstitutional, that the probability of quid pro quo arrangements could not be ruled under the opaque scheme.
Recent media reports suggest that the regime used a combination of the carrot and the stick to ‘extract’ money from private donors. This led to a wholesale exodus of the corporate capital to the BJP which is reflected in the recent disclosures on electoral bonds. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, the ruling BJP got six times more corporate funding in comparison to the Congress, its principal opposition and more than one and half times the funds of the remaining parties combined.
In return, the government wrote off loans, worth approximately Rs 10 lakh crores. The pro-corporate bias of the regime is evident by the fact that the government is now generating more revenue from personal income tax rather than corporate taxes for the first time in three decades. It has exacerbated the already existing levels of inequality; and the wealth of the richest Indians has grown under its tenure while the masses struggle with inflation.
The great re-accommodation
This new compact severely distorted the level playing field which is essential for a functioning democracy. Furthermore, the weaponisation of institutions gave rise to a much more authoritarian system – a change observed in the constant downgrading of India’s democratic credentials internationally.
Once the opposition was sufficiently weakened, prime minister Modi reneged on the last remaining promise of punishing the corrupt political elite and began co-opting them if they accepted his political and ideological patronage.
Thus, began the process of re-accommodation of the defeated political elites, once branded corrupt by the prime minister. The process unleashed by the anti-corruption movement, which began with righteous disdain against the political elite, ended with their seamless co-option from the old to the new ruling dispensation.
Emergence of “post-corruption” polity
Interestingly, today the issue of corruption does not find much space in the public discourse. This is primarily because the current opposition under Rahul Gandhi has reversed the causation of corruption and targeted the rent-seeking economic elites. The Modi-regime neither punished the corrupt political elite nor reformed the system; rather used it instrumentally to attack the opposition while institutionalising corruption via electoral bonds.
What we have now is a “post-corruption” polity. Where issues of transparency, rights, free media and justice have been replaced by national pride, corporate-led development and majoritarianism.
In retrospect, the movement against corruption turned out to be nothing but a trojan horse for the elite takeover of the economy under an increasingly autocratic political order.
Anshul Trivedi has a PhD in political science from JNU and is currently a Congress worker.